Excerpt

Few concepts have engendered as much discourse as establishing the “correct” definition for biological species. Charles Darwin made the species his focal point in the Origin of Species despite ignoring his title in favor of the more tractable problem of species change. Darwin addressed species “transmutation” in terms of competition among varieties—variants within a preexisting species. Following Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Darwin understood perfectly well that a species is not a point but a cloud or an interbreeding populations of phylogenetic relatives—branches in a shared line of descent. Despite this fact, the ensuing field of population genetics has tended to treat the species as a singular entity with a small number of mutants generated from a dominant wildtype.

Bibliography

Eigen, M. 1971. “Selforganization of Matter and the Evolution of Biological Macromolecules.” Naturwissenschaften 58:465–523. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00623322.

Eigen, M., and P. Schuster. 1979. The Hypercycle: A Principle of Natural Self-Organization. Berlin, Germany: Springer.

Maynard Smith, J. 1979. “Hypercycles and the Origin of Life.” Nature 280:445–446. https://doi.org/10.1038/280445a0.

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