Consensus and a Unified Species Paradigm: Reality or Idle Hope

Conix, Stijn

doi:10.3998/ptpbio.2102

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 25 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This is exemplified by the case of taxonomy. On the one hand, taxonomists have the ambition to circumscribe species that somehow represent real units in nature, typically units that are somehow 'evolutionary independent' from other such units, and many disagreements on species classifications relate to different interpretations of evolution and evolutionary patterns, both in general and regarding the particular organisms on the table (Conix, 2018(Conix, , 2022de Queiroz, 2007). These debates are legitimate, and their outcome can have important consequences, for example for conservation.…”

Section: Species Planets Diseases and Epochsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resolving Conceptual Conflicts through Voting

Cuypers

Block

2023

Found Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Scientific activities strongly depend on concepts and classifications to represent the world in an orderly and workable manner. This creates a trade-off. On the one hand, it is important to leave space for conceptual and classificatory criticism. On the other hand, agreement on which concepts and classifications to use, is often crucial for communication and the integration of research and ideas. In this paper, we show that this trade-off can sometimes be best resolved through conceptual governance, in which scientific institutions set a collective conceptual standard, and that voting can be a reasonable way to implement that governance. Voting is a means to simultaneously aggregate among conflicting values, preferences and priorities that often underpin conceptual or classificatory debates, all while signaling ongoing disagreement. We also discuss how the legitimacy of the voting process and its outcome can be ensured.

show abstract

Section: Species Planets Diseases and Epochsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resolving Conceptual Conflicts through Voting

Cuypers

Block

2023

Found Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and speciation complexity in palaeoanthropology

Meneganzin,

Stringer

2024

Evolutionary Journal of the Linnean Society

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Tracking the origins of new species and delimiting taxa across space and time present well-trodden sources of controversy for palaeoanthropology. Although biological diversity comes with frustratingly elusive boundaries, the task of describing and understanding diversity remains no less crucial, and palaeotaxonomy no more dispensable. This is epitomized by recent developments in discussions on our species' origins and the extent to which Middle Pleistocene hominin forms represent distinct lineages. While it is tempting to think that progress in such debates is only hampered by the paucity of fossil and genomic data, we argue that problems also lie with unrealistic assumptions in theory. In particular, we examine ongoing discussions on whether H. sapiens and Neanderthal deserve distinct species status as a means to advocate for the necessity of reframing speciation in palaeoanthropology in a more biologically plausible way. We argue that available palaeontological evidence is best interpreted under a framework that sees speciation as an evolutionary process that starts in space, thereby involving a geographic dimension, and progresses in time, thereby involving a diachronic dimension, with an incremental accumulation of relevant characters at different phases of the process. We begin by discussing evidence about species-level differentiation of H. sapiens and Neanderthals and analyze major sources of taxonomic disagreement, before illustrating the potential of this perspective in making progress on the earliest stages of H. sapiens speciation within Africa.

show abstract

Challenges of molecular barcode-based identification of earthworm specimens for biodiversity assessment

Barraux,

Noël,

Roy

et al. 2024

Front. Ecol. Evol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Specimen identification at the species level is a critical challenge for understanding community structure and conserving biodiversity. The use of mitochondrial DNA barcodes, in addition to morphology, has proven to be a useful tool for earthworm identification, but it has also raised difficulties. Thus, approaches to delineating molecular operational taxonomic units (MOTUs) from cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 (COI) or 16S rDNA sequence data often reveal more mitochondrial lineages than morphospecies, raising the question of whether these MOTUs should be used as taxonomic entities in community structure studies. Here, we used a newly acquired dataset of 576 COI barcodes of earthworms from Metropolitan France that were clustered in 36 MOTUS, corresponding to 21 morphospecies. We also incorporated data gathered from the literature to investigate this question. In order to match our MOTUs with already-described mitochondrial lineages, we downloaded reference sequences from the GenBank and BOLD platforms. In light of the difficulties encountered in recovering these sequences, we recommend that any new mitochondrial lineage described in a study be named consistently with previous works. Next, we analyzed the biological, ecological, and molecular data available in the literature on the different mitochondrial lineages that matched our MOTUs in order to determine if there was a consensus for species delimitation. Although the study specimens mainly belong to the Lumbricidae, which is one of the most studied families of earthworms, the data are often missing to determine if the MOTUs correspond to different species. Pending revision of the taxonomy, MOTUs for which mitochondrial divergence has been confirmed by morphological differences should be considered distinct taxonomic entities in community structure studies. In the absence of morphological differences and pending more data, we propose to distinguish for these analyses, within sexually reproducing morphospecies, the MOTUs for which mitochondrial divergence has been confirmed by multilocus nuclear data, while in the case of reproduction by parthenogenesis, ecological differences between MOTUs are necessary to consider them as different taxonomic entities.

show abstract

Consensus and a Unified Species Paradigm: Reality or Idle Hope

Cited by 3 publications

References 25 publications

Resolving Conceptual Conflicts through Voting

Resolving Conceptual Conflicts through Voting

Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and speciation complexity in palaeoanthropology

Challenges of molecular barcode-based identification of earthworm specimens for biodiversity assessment

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About