Principios de Taxonomia

2.9 Taxonomy s Status as a Soft or Hard Science j29
what a species is (Coyne and Orr, 2004). Pigliucci, in contrast, states that
philosophers of science could be extremely useful to the practical scientist, if only
we would stop a moment to listen to what they are saying (Pigliucci, 2002).
The downside of this controversial situation is no more and no less than the
endangerment of the status of taxonomy as a science. If biological species are only a
matter of diagnosis and sorting efforts, they cannot be subject to natural laws. This is
reasonable grounds for suspecting that taxonomy is a science set apart from the other
natural sciences, which have their own laws of thought (Griffiths, 1999). That biology
is subject to different laws of thought than the rest of the natural sciences is
something that Ernst Mayr also noted and often verbalized in his own way (Mayr,
1982). However, he saw this as something positive, as though this would speak for
biology; he did not see anything alarming in this situation that would possibly
endanger biology s, or at least organismic biology s status among the natural
sciences. Although physics today is something markedly different than physics at
the time of Newton (indeed, the discipline is so severely different that Newton s
physics must be considered to be wrong to a certain extent) (Smolin, 1997), which is
not true for biology, contemporary physicists view earlier physics respectfully and
continue to teach it. In contrast, modern biologists, who are very much focused on the
functioning of molecules, devalue organismic biology in a somewhat derogatory
manner as classical and no longer teach it. This is a telling difference.
Atran (1999) and Bachmann (1998) refer to taxonomy as an intuitive folkbiology.
Biological organisms are intuitively combined into groups on the basis of their traits
(Heywood, 1998). However, scientists must be careful not to become the victim of
mental preconceptions (see above). Admittedly, evolutionary epistemology (Lorenz,
1977) teaches us that cognitive preconceptions are an adaptation to the requirements
of optimally finding our way in the environment. However, a world view that is
optimally suited to finding our way, orienting ourselves and working progressively is
not the same as the truth. To find our way on Earth in everyday life, we do not need to
know that the Earth is a sphere; the intuitive feeling of the Earth being a disk suffices.
You have to carefully distinguish between common sense and provable facts. The
mental representation of taxon groupings, which is not based on experience, may be
an illusion (Atran, 1999).
In 1928, when Ernst Mayr studied the bird species living in the Arfak mountains in
New Guinea, he charged the incumbent natives, who were experienced bird hunters,
with shooting birds and bringing them to him. Every time a new bird was brought to
him, he asked the hunter for the bird s name in the native local language. To his
surprise, he realized that his intended work there had already been done. The natives
distinguished, as did he, approximately 135 bird species (Schilthuizen, 2001).
This experience led Mayr to the conviction that species must be distinct entities in
nature because people with different educational backgrounds and cultures classified
birds using the same traits (Mayr and Ashlock, 1991). However, the opposite
conclusion should actually be drawn. This astonishing perceptional identity speaks
more to the similarity of the mental grouping and classification structures existing in
the human brain than to 135 bird species actually existing in nature. The conceptions
of laypeople in the field of taxonomy do not justify concluding that this mode of