Principios de Taxonomia

Introduction
In one of his most famous works, Die Harzreise ( The Harz Journey ) (Heine,
1826), the German poet Heinrich Heine found a beautiful flower on the Brocken, the
highest peak in the German Harz mountains. Tourists were standing nearby in
considerable numbers, and they all wanted to know the name of the flower. Heine
expressed particular aversion to this demand and wrote:
It always annoys me to see that God s dear flowers have been divided into castes,
just like ourselves, and according to similar external features like differing stamens.
If there has to be classification, people should follow the suggestion made by
Theophrastus, who wanted to classify flowers in a more spiritual manner, that is,
by scent. As for me, I have my own system of natural history, according to which I
classify everything as eatable or uneatable (The Harz Journey; English translation
Heine) (Heine, 2006).
This almost two-century-old assessment of taxonomy is not as absurd as it might at
first appear. Even today, taxonomic classifications are based on several subjective
standards of valuation that do not withstand a thorough theoretical test. There are
several reasons for this problem (Mallet, 1995). One reason is that, even today, no
theory in taxonomy can determine and prescribe which traits may be used in
taxonomic classification and which may not.
No binding rules exist for the classification of individuals into species, nor is it clear
whether species exist at all. Notwithstanding the title of his famous work On the
Origin of Species, Charles Darwin did not believe in the existence of species
(Chapter 2). He took species for constructed units, defined to achieve a comfortable
ordering of living beings that would not even exist in the absence of human principles
of classification. Many recent authors treat the biological species in precisely the
same way.
Several taxonomists agree that a definition of the term species will never be
possible. Indeed, they state that this issue is merely an academic question and that it
is not meaningful for a scientist to devote time to such a problem. To these
taxonomists, the expectation that the nature of species can be understood represents
an illusory goal that cannot be achieved.
As an alternative, they restrict taxonomy to the simple goal of identification. To
work with species and to understand the function of a species and its ecological role, it
Do Species Exist? Principles of Taxonomic Classification, First Edition. Werner Kunz.
Ó 2012 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA. Published 2012 by Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.
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