Species

xxxiv Prologue

on prior work (although I keep nding people expressing the view that logical spe-
cies are individuals; for example, Boëthius, Aquinas, and Cusa, and in the biological
tradition, even Mivart discusses a version of it, in which species are like organisms).
So far as I can tell, there are precursors or forerunners for everything else, at least
in the sense of resemblance, if not direct and demonstrated descent. Even clustering
concepts like the Homeostatic Property Cluster notion of Boyd have antecedents. It
is often the case that these ideas are continually reinvented, especially by biologists.
Equally, however, it is often the case that these modern alternatives are not directly
descended from the precursors, although there is evidence of indirect descent. For
example, Rutgers geneticist Jody Hey expressed the view^47 that species are merely
conventional objects used for communication, a reinvention in some respects of John
Locke’s earlier conventionalism (as we will discuss). He depends extensively upon
W. V. O. Quine’s philosophy of language in Word and Object.^48 Quine is, of course,
dealing with the same issues of the empiricist, linguistically directed, philosophical
tradition that Locke began, and knows his Locke very well, but Hey understandably
seems unaware of it. A geneticist can be excused for not knowing the detailed history
of an epistemological episode in philosophy, but this pattern is repeated even when
the originator of a view, for instance Hennig, is aware of his philosophical precursors
(including in this case Woodger and Gregg^49 ). Later followers of that initial account
often do not realize that there ever was such a prior history.
For this reason, it is important to at least sketch some of the main pre-biology and
early biology historical accounts of species, and this of course means beginning in
the western tradition with Plato and Aristotle. I seek to be excused for this western
bias, despite much interesting literature in Persian and Asian cultures on classica-
tion of organisms, because it is from the western tradition and not the others that the
modern species problem derives, and on which it depends. For the same reason, I
will pass over the work of cultural anthropologists on classication in non-western
indigenous cultures^50 and the work done on the developmental and psychological
origins of taxonomic concepts.^51 Scientic concepts, whatever their etiology in our
biological substrate, are primarily subject to change due to the institutions and cul-
ture of science and cultural inuences such as philosophy. We all share whatever
psychological and cognitive foundations there are of classication and categorical
notions, but the scientic debate has gone its own way, and so biological biases are
not determinants of such categories. Cultural evolution, including the evolution of
science,^52 has its own dynamics, perhaps biased by psychology and evolutionary
adaptations and heritage, but it is usually decoupled from them.^53

(^47) Hey 20 01b, Hey 2001a.
(^48) Quine 1960.
(^49) Among others. Nicolai Hartmann appears to have been a philosophical inuence on Hennig too
[Hennig 1966, 22]. See Va r m a 2 013 for the details.
(^50) See Bulmer 1967, Atran 1985, Atran 1990, Ellen 1993, Atran 1995, Atran 1998, Atran 1999.
(^51) Millikan 1984, Sperber and Wilson 1986, Estes 1994, Sperber et al. 1995, Keil 1995, Grifths 1997,
Eco 1999, Gil-White 2001, Hey 2001b. Despite its title, Ghiselin’s paper “On psychologism in the
logic of taxonomic controversies” [Ghiselin 1966] does not address the psychological origins of taxa,
but the introduction into taxonomy of epistemological conventionalism.
(^52) Hull 1988a, Hull 1988b.
(^53) Campbell 1965, Toulmin 1972.