Species

Other Species Concepts 261

involving replacing that term (“species”) with another, for example, “deme,”^44 as

Pleijel (least inclusive taxonomic units [LITUs]) and Hey (evolutionary groups) do.

Given the history of the term, there is no reason to do this except to make it clear that

only a particular sort or kind is being referred to, and history shows also that such

attempts are always assimilated and subverted. Species keeps winning out.

Conventionalism: The Taxonomic Species Concept

I object to the term “species concept”, which I think is misleading. ... A species in

my opinion is a name given to a group of organisms for convenience, and indeed of

ne c essit y.^45

One major stream of thought, particularly among geneticists, with regard to species
is what we might call the conventional account, although it is sometimes called
the “nominalistic” or “cynical” concept.^46 On this widely held account, species are
“whatever a competent taxonomist chooses to call a species.” The complete quota-
tion from Charles Tate Regan, given by Julian Huxley,^47 is

A species is a community, or a number of communities, whose distinctive morphologi-

cal characters are, in the opinion of a competent systematist, sufficiently definite to

entitle it, or them, to a specific name.^48

Huxley goes on to note that the

difficulty with this definition lies in the term competent, which is what we have recently

learnt to call the “operative” word. And experience teaches us that even competent sys-

tematists do not always agree as to the delimitation of species.

Ghiselin also notes that there are no rules for deciding whether a reproductive
community is a species or a subspecies, and that one should wonder whose view to
accept when the experts disagree; and such disagreement is common.
In fact, this view is not new, and predates Darwinian evolutionary theory by some
time, at least in Britain, for some time. Darwin himself was a member of the drafting
panel that proposed just this standard for the new Rules of Zoological Nomenclature
in 1842—the so-called Strickland Code. In so defining the basic taxon this way,
the British Association for the Advancement of Science legislators “consciously and
conspicuously distanced themselves from disputes over definitions of species,”^49 and,
according to McOuat, established the naming rights of a species to be a delineation
of what a competent naturalist was—basically, someone who was accepted by the
naturalist community, and primarily, someone with a position at a museum, thus

(^44) Winsor 2000.
(^45) Haldane 1956, 95.
(^46) Kitcher 1984.
(^47) Huxley 1942, 157. See also Trewavas 1973, Ghiselin 1997, 118.
(^48) Regan 1926, 75.
(^49) McOuat 2001, 3.