Principios de Taxonomia

2.14 The Dualism of the Species Concept: the Epistemic vs. the Operative Goalj43
Practical taxonomy sees the species as a unit that satisfies a practical need. Practical
taxonomy is concerned with manufacturing artificial classes into which the diverse
individual organisms can be arranged according to their trait similarities or genetic
distances. It is about a classification principle that makes the vast material of
biodiversity utilizable and ensures communication between practicing taxonomists.
However, this taxonomy is based on sorting principles that humans have shaped
according to their own needs. The criteria of delimitation (e.g., of traits) obviously do
exist in nature, but the results of the grouping, which are species, do not necessarily
exist in nature. These species are made, not discovered, although the traits by which
the organisms are combined into species were obviously discovered at some point.
Species, as they truly exist in nature, only require cohesive connections by which
the organisms are joined. True species do not need to be sorted because they are
already grouped in nature before human discovery. It is very important to understand
this difference; many taxonomists do not see themselves as the inventors of species
but as their discoverers.
Philosophizing about the strange world of taxonomy is not relevant to the daily
routine of science. We work with all of this, without really having to think about it, is
what some taxonomists say. If you ask them more probingly, taxonomists commonly
fall back to the pragmatism, At the end of the day, we can work well with this.
Repeatedly, what the biophilosopher David Hull clearly expressed in his article
The ideal species concept – and why we can t get it (Hull, 1997) seems to apply.
Either the species concept is theoretically conclusive, consistent and based on the
natural laws of evolution and is thereby unsuited for practical taxonomical applications,
or the species concept orients itself according to operational pragmatics and is
neither strictly consistent nor founded on a reproducible law. The biological species
as a real unit is not suited for the everyday life of a taxonomist or mutual worldwide
communication because of a lack of practical manageability. Conversely, the biological
species as a workable unit for the division of biodiversity in practice is
unacceptable for the theorist because of a lack of consistency and prevailing
contrariness. The more consistency is sought, the less the classification of species
is practical (Hey, 2001), and the more practicality is sought after, the less the
classification of species represents consistent thinking. All of these factors lead to
a dualism in the species concept.
Thebestexampleofthisdilemmaisthehundredsorthousandsofattemptstoreplace
the typological taxonomy with a consistent monophyletic taxonomy (Chapter 7).
A consistent monophyletic taxonomy cannot work in practice and did not become
widely accepted until present day. Attempts have been made to completely replace the
Metazoansystemwithanewsystemconsistingonlyofmonophyla(Ax,1995).However,
the past two decades have shown that all attempts to replace classical taxonomy with a
strictly monophyletic taxonomy have failed because they were not widely accepted.
Practicing taxonomy does not tolerate theoretical consistency.
Another example of the rejected efforts to introducing theoretical consistency into
practicing taxonomy is the futile attempt to replace Linnaean nomenclature with the
phylocode (Chapter 7). Because the genus names in Linnaean nomenclature
convey the wrong impression that the genera among different animal groups