Genes, Categories, and Species: The Evolutionary and Cognitive Cause of the Species Problem

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Oxford University Press, 2001. 7. 19. - 240페이지
In Genes, Categories and Species, Jody Hey provides an enlightening new solution to one of biology's most ironic and perplexing puzzles. When Darwin showed that life evolves, and that it does so by natural selection, he transformed our understanding of living things. But the very question Darwin addressed-the nature of species-continues to pose an awkward conundrum for biologists. Despite enormous efforts by a great many scholars, biologists still cannot agree on how to identify species or even how to define the word "species." Genes, Categories, and Species is not like other books on the species problem, for it does not begin by asking, "What is a species?" Instead, it focuses on the very fact that biologists are stumped by species and their curious behavior in coping with that uncertainty. Faced with a persistent conundrum-and no lack of data on the subject-biologists who ponder the species problem have ceased to ask the most essential of scientific questions: "What new information do we need to resolve the problem?" This is the question that motivates this book and leads to the discoveries it reveals. The answer to the species problem lies not with the processes and patterns of biological diversity, Hey contends, but rather in the way the human mind perceives and categorizes that diversity. The promise of this book is twofold. First, it allows biologists to understand the causes of the species problem and to use this knowledge to avoid the major confusions that arise over species. Second, with its explanation of the species problem, it gives scholars and students of human nature a humbling example of how ill-suited the human mind is for certain kinds of scientific questions.

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The Hidden Question 1 The Species Problem
3
The Mode of Ignorance
15
The Theory of Life
27
Part I Conclusions
40
Species in Nature and within the Mind 4 Categories
45
Typological Thinking about Species
61
Biological Diversity
67
Recombination and Biological Species
88
Part II Conclusions
128
Living with the Species Problem 10 PHYLOGENY
133
Systematics
145
Evolutionary Biology
159
What Are Species? What Are Taxa?
169
What Is to Be Done?
180
References
195
Index
213

The Cause of the Species Problem
105
The Origin of Natural Kinds
111

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48 페이지 - There is nothing more basic than categorization to our thought, perception, action and speech. Every time we see something as a kind of thing, for example, a tree, we are categorizing. Whenever we reason about kinds of things — chairs, nations, illnesses, emotions, any kind of thing at all — we are employing categories.
201 페이지 - MC Smith, RN Burns, ME Ford, and GF Hatfull. 1999. Evolutionary relationships among diverse bacteriophages and prophages: all the world's a phage.
102 페이지 - biological" species as follows: "species are groups of interbreeding natural populations that are reproductively isolated from other such groups
150 페이지 - Cracraft defined a phylogenetic species as "an irreducible (basal) cluster of organisms, diagnosably distinct from other such clusters, and within which there is a parental pattern of ancestry and descent
198 페이지 - Ferris, SD, RD Sage, C.-M. Huang, JT Nielsen, U. Ritte, and AC Wilson. 1983. Flow of mitochondrial DNA across a species boundary. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 80:2290-94.
123 페이지 - Vagueness is a natural consequence of the basic mechanism of word learning. The penumbral objects of a vague term are the objects whose similarity to ones for which the verbal response has been rewarded is relatively slight.
76 페이지 - ... gene pool." The concept of the "gene pool" comes to us from population genetics and evolutionary theory. It was introduced surprisingly late, in 1950, by Theodosius Dobzhansky, who used it to help establish a Mendelian definition of "species" as "a reproductive community of sexual and cross-fertilizing individuals which share in a common gene pool
69 페이지 - ... given time as we can, we notice at once that the observed variation does not form a single probability distribution or any other kind of continuous distribution. Instead, a multitude of separate, discrete, distributions are found. In other words, the living world is not a single array of individuals in which any two variants are connected by unbroken series of intergrades, but an array of more or less distinctly separate arrays, intermediates between which are absent or at least rare. Each array...
197 페이지 - CW and R. Wyatt. 1989. Hybridization and introgression in buckeyes (Aesculus: Hippocastanaceae): a review of the evidence and a hypothesis to explain long-distance gene flow. Syst. Bot.

저자 정보 (2001)

Jody Hey is Professor of Genetics at Rutgers University, where he uses both mathematical theory and DNA sequencing to study the process of evolution. In recent years he has conducted research on the evolutionary divergence of fruit fly species and on the evolutionary origins of modern humans. This book was written while Dr. Hey was visiting the University of Edinburgh, Scotland with the aid of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

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