Species

Darwin and the Darwinians 181

that species were variable populations, and so he adopted “population thinking.”

However, according to Mayr, Darwin treated the division into species as arbitrary,

and approached the matter “purely typologically, as characterized by ‘degree of

d i f fe r e n c e.’”^93

Recent authors have argued that Darwin was, as Poulton and his generation had

assumed, a species denier. Mallet, for example, says this:

Throughout the history of the species debate, starting with Darwin, there have been

some who argue that species are not individual real objects, but should instead be con-

sidered merely as man-made constructs, merely useful in understanding biodiversity

and its evolution. These people are not necessarily nihilists, who deny that species

exist: they simply argue that actual morphological and genetic gaps between popula-

tions would be more useful for delimiting species than inferred processes underlying

evolution or maintenance of these gaps. By their refusal to unite these ideas under

a single named concept, this biologist ‘‘silent majority’’ has rarely found a common

voice.^94

This view, which has come to be known as “species nominalism,” has been chal-
lenged about Darwin.^95 Stamos has dealt with these interpretations in the first chap-
ter of his 2003, but then argues that Darwin was not merely a species taxa realist, as
interpreters like Beatty^96 held, but a species category (or rank) realist. I must disagree
with Stamos here. To my mind, the category that Darwin accepted was, as Beatty
suggests, a taxonomic category in practice, rather than an entity-class. For a start,
taxonomic discussions on variation in species was of long standing when the Origin
was published, and was a particularly hot issue when Darwin began his Notebooks.
Second, Darwin’s practice was standard well before he announced his evolutionary
theory. Beatty and Stamos think this is because he had a strategy to “sell” his views
against the prevailing fixism, but this is unlikely if fixism was already in the wind
when he published, for example, his Cirripedia studies, as I think it was. Darwin
was most definitely careful in his rhetorical strategies, but not about the concept of
species as such.
Others have attempted to argue that Darwin held an individualistic view of spe-
cies, that is, as spatiotemporally located and bordered singular objects.^97 Again, this
seems to be reading issues back into the past based on the concerns of the future,
but it is not, ipso facto, false. However, I think that the class/individual dichotomy
assumed here is somewhat overstated. If the Essentialism Story is wrong, histori-
cally, then there is no conflict between Darwin doing traditional classification,
morphologically, and the metaphysical notion, to which he never alludes, despite
Stamos’ linking of Locke’s conventionalism and Darwin’s Notebooks, that species
are particulars. I return to this in the third section of the book. For the moment, I
think it worth noting that Darwin was doing traditional taxonomy with “classes” and

(^93) Mayr 1982, 269.
(^94) Mallet 2007, 685. See also Mallet 2010.
(^95) For example, by Stamos 1996, 1999, 2003.
(^96) Beatty 1985.
(^97) See Gayon 1996.