I like Bernhard's approach very much. My enthusiasm is, however, a bit reserved regarding its practicability for my own studies. And I reckon it will be the same for many taxonomists / systematists working on other groups as well. It is the same with most other species concepts: We - the deep-sea isopod community - will never get to the point that we are in a position allowing us to apply the differential fitness species concept! How to infer the fitness effects of those few characters (be it morphology or molecules) which we are able to identify and use for systematics? Bernhard himself pointed at this problem in his final discussion and for us it remains the same procedure as before: We have to try our best to identify clusters based on morphological and molecular similarity, and maybe season it with some geographic evidence.
Wednesday 4 May 2011
Towards a generalized species concept
An interesting paper about species concepts which I have just finished reading: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1558-5646.2011.01231.x/full
I like Bernhard's approach very much. My enthusiasm is, however, a bit reserved regarding its practicability for my own studies. And I reckon it will be the same for many taxonomists / systematists working on other groups as well. It is the same with most other species concepts: We - the deep-sea isopod community - will never get to the point that we are in a position allowing us to apply the differential fitness species concept! How to infer the fitness effects of those few characters (be it morphology or molecules) which we are able to identify and use for systematics? Bernhard himself pointed at this problem in his final discussion and for us it remains the same procedure as before: We have to try our best to identify clusters based on morphological and molecular similarity, and maybe season it with some geographic evidence.
I like Bernhard's approach very much. My enthusiasm is, however, a bit reserved regarding its practicability for my own studies. And I reckon it will be the same for many taxonomists / systematists working on other groups as well. It is the same with most other species concepts: We - the deep-sea isopod community - will never get to the point that we are in a position allowing us to apply the differential fitness species concept! How to infer the fitness effects of those few characters (be it morphology or molecules) which we are able to identify and use for systematics? Bernhard himself pointed at this problem in his final discussion and for us it remains the same procedure as before: We have to try our best to identify clusters based on morphological and molecular similarity, and maybe season it with some geographic evidence.
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