Principios de Taxonomia

XIIj Foreword
formed out in various solutions within different evolutionary settings. Aplant species
is not directly comparable with an animal or mushroom species. In an evolutionary
perspective, all these species are the outcome of differing evolutionary strategies.
That is not true for their differentiation in taxonomic regard, but it is true in regard of
what species mean in life. Thus far, a species not only might be characterized by a set of
attributes allowing a reliable classification but may also offer principal differing
materials for an ongoing evolution. There, species of plants, various animals,
prokaryote species, and mushrooms may each react differently in evolution. Already,
sexuality is organized in all these life forms in a different way. In any case, there is just
something transferring a set of genes, certain morphological and functional specifications
from one to the next generations. The modes by which this is being practised
are different, however. What should be done in such a situation?
Werner Kunz did not offer a philosophical solution. He is presenting facts, and he
is doing that in a comparative perspective. One point Kunz makes is that the
taxonomists rely on Linnaeus who had a completely different view on nature from
that we have today. For Linnaeus any species is part of creation. If nature is such a
creation done by God, any entity in nature is reflecting an absolute ordering scheme.
Systematic will outline this scheme. Thus, live forms a thought to be organized like
the terms in a baroque encyclopedia. There, any term outlines a basic idea. Its true
meaning is intelligible when the order, in which it is used, is made obvious. The
underlying structure by which such ideas could be combined is the idea of a universal
topic reflecting the concept God has had in mind in setting out his creation. To
combine such a scheme with the Darwinian idea of a continuously varying world is
not possible. Nevertheless, idealistic morphology in the start of twentieth century
tried to do this. The result was a logical scheme adopted in principle by Willi Hennig.
He formed out an abstract pattern that allowed a proper classification, but was not
interested to integrate that view with a historical reconstruction of what actually
happened in the course of evolution. Cladism adopted Hennig s idea, which is now
forming the conceptual framing for evolutionary interpretation of DNA analyses.
When such an idea of a logically consistent scheme is combined with evolutionary
population biology, problems occur. Accordingly, in an attempt to combine such
approaches, one has to address anew the question what a species really is. If species
are individuals, evolutions will deal with them, resulting in new species. If species
consist of populations, and if microevolution works on the level of such population,
situations might become more difficult. What a species meant, cannot just be a
taxonomic entity without any functional relevance in evolutionary biology. Would that
be the case, we could not describe evolution as a process resulting in speciation. If
species are actually something evolution worked on, then, however, species themselves
(as structural units) might be entities that have been evolved as such ones
within various evolutionary constraints. Accordingly, a species might address something
different in plants, mushrooms, bacteria, viruses, and animals. On the other
hand, what is meant by such different concepts regarding the functionality of the
species? The resulting idea, describing evolutionary relevance of species within a
certain evolutionary process, might differ from what a species meant for other life
forms. A rodent will eat certain plants and will avoid poisonous ones. Thus, the