Species

The Synthesis and Species 213

are sometimes called elementary species, but they are not united into integrated groups

that are known as species in the cross-fertilizing [i.e., sexual—JSW] forms. The term

“elementary species” is therefore misleading and should be discarded.^17

Dobzhansky was influential in this regard, because de Vries’ term did largely dis-

appear from the debate. He also notes that biotypes can be cross-specific, and even

cross-generic, and that

[w]hich one of these ranks is ascribed to a given cluster is, however, decided by con-

siderations of convenience, and the decision is in this sense purely arbitrary. In other

words, the species as a category which is more fixed, and therefore less arbitrary than

the rest, is lacking in asexual and obligatorily self-fertilizing organisms. ...

The binomial system of nomenclature, which is applied universally to all living

beings, has forced systematists to describe “species” in the sexual as well as in the

asexual organisms. Two centuries have rooted this habit so firmly that any thorough

reform will meet with determined opposition. Nevertheless, systematists have come

to the conclusion that sexual species and “asexual species” must be distinguished. ...

In the opinion of the writer, all that is saved by this method is the word “species.” A

realization of the fundamental difference between the two kinds of “species” can make

the species concept methodologically more valuable than it has been.^18

In the 1951 edition he replaces the final sentence with:

As pointed out by Babcock and Stebbins... , “The species, in the case of a sexual group, is

an actuality as well as a human concept; in an agamic complex it ceases to be an actuality.”^19

He also begins to discuss issues of typological thinking, under the influence of
Mayr, in the chapter of the “fourth” edition^20 on populations, races, and subspecies,
where he notes

[t]he classical race concept [of human races—JSW] was typological. ...

Typology is at the bottom of the vulgar notion that any so-called Negro in the

United States ... has a basic and unremediable Negroid nature, just as any Jew partakes

of some Jewishness, etc. There are no Platonic types of Negroidness or Jewishness

or of every race of squirrel or butterflies. Individuals are not mere reflections of their

racial types; individual differences are the fundamental biological realities.^21

There is little hint of discussions of typology or essentialism in the earlier works.

Dobzhansky deals extensively with variation within populations; it is the raison

d’être of the book, and so it might be a case of the wood not needing to be specified

when the trees are so well described. By 1970, though, he is well in line with the

Mayrian Received View approach.

(^17) Dobzhansky 1941, 320f.
(^18) Dobzhansky 1937, 321.
(^19) Dobzhansky 1951, 275.
(^20) Dobzhansky 1970.
(^21) Dobzhansky 1970, 268f.