Mishler and Brandon (1987: 403)
accuse me of engaging in ad hominem attacks and fallacious arguments. I wonder if by that they mean criticisms that hit home and arguments that have unpleasant consequences for their views. I did in fact suggest that certain (un-named) botanists ought to clean up their collective act and deal with the issues like competent biologists and honest scholars. There has been too much obfuscation and misrepresentation in the literature on species concepts, and alas Mishler and Brandon provide yet another example.
Mishler and Brandon quote me incorrectly as saying that the biological species definition is "'fully applicable to plants. '" What I actually said (Ghiselin, 1987a: 135) was that "The biological species definition turns out to be fully applicable to those plants in which species actually do exist." Zoologists and botanists alike recognize the existence of nonspecies and species in the process of speciating. And plenty of botanists accept the biological species definition (Stebbins, 1987). But some botanists have, in their criticisms of the biological species definition, adduced what are not cases of non-applicability at all, but rather things like highly polymorphic species and cryptic ones. The application of the individuality concept to species taxa "as currently delimited" (Mishler and Brandon, 1987: 400) would indeed create problems. But that only begs the question. Why not delimit them otherwise?
Well, that would be a lot of work, and some people do not like work, or at least that kind of work. Lazyness is one of the reasons why people resist change in traditional practice, but it is not the only one. There are good reasons why it is not desirable that every organism be placed in a species (Ghiselin, 1987a). Are there any good reasons why every organism should be placed in a species? One bad reason is obvious: tradition. That was the way in which names were attached to specimens, and it is indeed desirable that we have names for all organisms. But there are other ways, such as annotation, that allow one to name pseudospecies. If Mishler, or anybody else for that matter, can come up with a good reason for treating pseudospecies as if they were species I would like to know what that is.