Why does the nature of species matter? comments on Ghiselin and Mayr

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1987
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 343 KB
• Volume: 2
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0169-3867
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00057963

✦ Synopsis

difficulty in understanding what a biological population is, citing a remark I made in response to an argument of Elliott Sober's. But Mayr has quite failed to understand the point of discussion between Sober and me. In (Kitcher 1984a), I alleged that it was possible for "instant speciation" to occur: that is, for offspring to belong to a species different from that of their parents. Sober replied that geneticists count the offspring as members of the same breeding population. I countered (Kitcher 1984b) by pointing out that in this sense of 'population' there is no implication that two members of the same "population" are conspecific. The moral is that the term 'population' is dangerously ambiguous. Nobody is denying that the implication of belonging to the same species holds when one holds any of a number of standard species concepts (most prominently the biological species concept) and one uses the naturalist's notion of population. Sober and I were discussing something different, and I think only someone laboring under the prior conviction that "philosophers" make certain kinds of errors would have failed to see the difference and, as a result, concluded that the prior generalization had yet another confirming instance. I believe that my other philosophical colleagues who are also charged with ignoring points that Mayr (rightly) cherishes will easily find similar ways of setting the record straight.