Why some biologists are beginning to question the “biological species concept”

_{Denyse O'Leary

June 25, 2019

Intelligent Design, speciation}

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Because it hasn’t made sense for quite some time and some are beginning to notice the problem.

The problem that Hejnol sees with the whole system is that the ranks don’t mean anything specific or uniform across all groups of life. Even though species is arguably the most important rank across multiple fields of biology, there are dozens of species concepts in use — and biologists working with different groups of organisms can’t seem to agree on just one. You might think that the other end of the hierarchy would be more settled, but it wasn’t so long ago that domains simply didn’t exist — the three domains we use today (Archaea, Bacteria and Eucarya) were only proposed in 1990. At that time, the top rank was kingdom, and there were five of those; now there are at least six, though some say there should be as many as 32. Similar ambiguities plague all the taxonomic ranks in between — even those often considered to be major, distinct and unambiguous, like phyla.
Perhaps this could all be resolved if the scientific community simply agreed upon a definition for each rank, but there’s no consensus for that.

Christie Wilcox, “What’s in a Name? Taxonomy Problems Vex Biologists” at Quanta

If modern biology began with “On the Origin of Species,” many may be willing to live with chaos to protect the sacred history.

See also: A physicist looks at biology’s problem of “speciation” in humans

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Comments

BS77
In that statement Gun basically concedes the point I made at post 4. Again Gun stated that Darwinists tend to lean towards the belief that the concept of “species” is not real but is “a subjective, arbitrary, human construct.”
Of course the concept of species is a subjective human construct. Who has suggested otherwise? The same applies to genus, order, family, phylum, kingdom, etc. They are all the result of a subjective human classification system.Brother Brian_{June 26, 2019
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Gun at 11 states,
A common debate between non-evolutionists and evolutionists in the 19th century (and even 18th century) was whether “species” were a real, objective “thing”, or were they a subjective, arbitrary, human construct. Non-evolutionists generally leaned towards the former, and evolutionists towards the latter.
In that statement Gun basically concedes the point I made at post 4. Again Gun stated that Darwinists tend to lean towards the belief that the concept of “species” is not real but is "a subjective, arbitrary, human construct." Where oh where have have I heard Darwinian materialists claim that something is not real but is only imaginary? Oh I remember, that would be everything, (including our own sense of self), that is not material.
As I have pointed out several times now, assuming Naturalism instead of Theism as the worldview on which all of science is based leads to the catastrophic epistemological failure of science itself.
Basically, because of reductive materialism (and/or methodological naturalism), the atheistic materialist is forced to claim that he is merely a ‘neuronal illusion’ (Coyne, Dennett, etc..), who has the illusion of free will (Harris), who has unreliable beliefs about reality (Plantinga), who has illusory perceptions of reality (Hoffman), who, since he has no real time empirical evidence substantiating his grandiose claims, must make up illusory “just so stories” with the illusory, and impotent, ‘designer substitute’ of natural selection (Behe, Gould, Sternberg), so as to ‘explain away’ the appearance (i.e. illusion) of design (Crick, Dawkins), and who must make up illusory meanings and purposes for his life since the reality of the nihilism inherent in his atheistic worldview is too much for him to bear (Weikart), and who must also hold morality to be subjective and illusory since he has rejected God (Craig, Kreeft). Bottom line, nothing is real in the atheist’s worldview, least of all, morality, meaning and purposes for life.,,, – Darwin’s Theory vs Falsification – video – 39:45 minute mark https://youtu.be/8rzw0JkuKuQ?t=2387
Thus, although the Darwinist may firmly believes he is on the terra firma of science (in his appeal, even demand, for methodological naturalism), the fact of the matter is that, when examining the details of his materialistic/naturalistic worldview, it is found that Darwinists/Atheists are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to. It would be hard to fathom a worldview more antagonistic to modern science than Atheistic materialism and/or methodological naturalism have turned out to be.
2 Corinthians 10:5 Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;
Besides Darwinists denying that we really exist as real people but are merely illusions, the Darwinist, if he were consistent, would also claim that mathematics itself is not real but is only an imaginary construct of the human mind,,,
What Does It Mean to Say That Science & Religion Conflict? – M. Anthony Mills – April 16, 2018 Excerpt: Barr rightly observes that scientific atheists often unwittingly assume not just metaphysical naturalism but an even more controversial philosophical position: reductive materialism, which says all that exists is or is reducible to the material constituents postulated by our most fundamental physical theories. As Barr points out, this implies not only that God does not exist — because God is not material — but that you do not exist. For you are not a material constituent postulated by any of our most fundamental physical theories; at best, you are an aggregate of those constituents, arranged in a particular way. Not just you, but tables, chairs, countries, countrymen, symphonies, jokes, legal contracts, moral judgments, and acts of courage or cowardice — all of these must be fully explicable in terms of those more fundamental, material constituents. In fact, more problematic for the materialist than the non-existence of persons is the existence of mathematics. Why? Although a committed materialist might be perfectly willing to accept that you do not really exist, he will have a harder time accepting that numbers do not exist. The trouble is that numbers — along with other mathematical entities such as classes, sets, and functions — are indispensable for modern science. And yet — here’s the rub — these “abstract objects” are not material. Thus, one cannot take science as the only sure guide to reality and at the same time discount disbelief in all immaterial realities. https://www.realclearreligion.org/articles/2018/04/16/what_does_it_mean_to_say_that_science_and_religion_conflict.html
As alluded to above there are an endless litany of things that everyone, including Darwinists, insist that are real but that fall into the catagory of being abstract, and thus, (on a Darwinian materialistic view of reality), necessarily illusory,
If something is not composed of particles or does not have physical properties (e.g., mass, energy, orientation, position, etc), it is abstract, i.e., spiritual. Numbers, mathematics, logic, truth, distance, time, beauty, ugliness, species, person, information, etc.. etc.. fall in that category. It is amazing how many things fall in that category even though most of us, including scientists (which is also an abstract term), swear they exist physically.
Moreover, to make this dilemma even more devastating to the Darwinian materialists, it turns out that atoms themselves are not the solid indivisible concrete particles, as they were originally envisioned to be by materialists, but it turns out that the descriptions we now use to describe atoms themselves, the further down we go, dissolve into "abstract conceptual tools for describing nature, which themselves seem to lack any real, concrete essence.,,,"
Physics Is Pointing Inexorably to Mind So-called “information realism” has some surprising implications By Bernardo Kastrup - March 25, 2019 Excerpt: according to the Greek atomists, if we kept on dividing things into ever-smaller bits, at the end there would remain solid, indivisible particles called atoms, imagined to be so concrete as to have even particular shapes. Yet, as our understanding of physics progressed, we’ve realized that atoms themselves can be further divided into smaller bits, and those into yet smaller ones, and so on, until what is left lacks shape and solidity altogether. At the bottom of the chain of physical reduction there are only elusive, phantasmal entities we label as “energy” and “fields”—abstract conceptual tools for describing nature, which themselves seem to lack any real, concrete essence.,,, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/physics-is-pointing-inexorably-to-mind/
In fact, according to quantum theory, the most fundamental 'stuff' of the world is not even matter or energy at all but is immaterial information itself
"The most fundamental definition of reality is not matter or energy, but information–and it is the processing of information that lies at the root of all physical, biological, economic, and social phenomena." Vlatko Vedral - Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, and CQT (Centre for Quantum Technologies) at the National University of Singapore, and a Fellow of Wolfson College - a recognized leader in the field of quantum mechanics. “It is operationally impossible to separate Reality and Information” (48:35 minute mark) “In the beginning was the Word” John 1:1 (49:54 minute mark) Prof Anton Zeilinger speaks on quantum physics. at UCT https://youtu.be/s3ZPWW5NOrw?t=2984
Thus, in irony of ironies, not even the material particles themselves turn to be are 'real', (on a materialistic definition of what is 'real'), but turn out to be immaterial information. This puts the die-hard materialist in quite the conundrum because as Bernardo Kastrup further explains in the preceding article, to make sense of this conundrum of a non-material world of pure abstractions we must ultimately appeal to an immaterial mind.
Physics Is Pointing Inexorably to Mind So-called “information realism” has some surprising implications By Bernardo Kastrup - March 25, 2019 Excerpt: "To make sense of this conundrum,,, we must stick to what is most immediately present to us: solidity and concreteness are qualities of our experience. The world measured, modeled and ultimately predicted by physics is the world of perceptions, a category of mentation. The phantasms and abstractions reside merely in our descriptions of the behavior of that world, not in the world itself.,,, Where we get lost and confused is in imagining that what we are describing is a non-mental reality underlying our perceptions, as opposed to the perceptions themselves. We then try to find the solidity and concreteness of the perceived world in that postulated underlying reality. However, a non-mental world is inevitably abstract. And since solidity and concreteness are felt qualities of experience—what else?—we cannot find them there. The problem we face is thus merely an artifact of thought, something we conjure up out of thin air because of our theoretical habits and prejudices.,,, As I elaborate extensively in my new book, The Idea of the World, none of this implies solipsism. The mental universe exists in mind but not in your personal mind alone. Instead, it is a transpersonal field of mentation that presents itself to us as physicality—with its concreteness, solidity and definiteness—once our personal mental processes interact with it through observation. This mental universe is what physics is leading us to, not the hand-waving word games of information realism. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/physics-is-pointing-inexorably-to-mind/
Or to put it much more simply, as Physics professor Richard Conn Henry put it at the end of the following article, "The Universe is immaterial — mental and spiritual. Live, and enjoy."
The mental Universe - Richard Conn Henry The only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the Universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things. Excerpt: "The Universe is immaterial — mental and spiritual. Live, and enjoy." - Richard Conn Henry is a Professor in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/The.mental.universe.pdf
bornagain77_{June 26, 2019
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You are responding to an argument I didn't make. SA made a comment to the effect that inability to breed with given organisms would never have a fitness benefit. As it turns out, this is simply not true. Now, if you want to know when and under which circumstances it is beneficial to precent outcrossing, or just to learn the many ways species can become reproductive isolated without natural selection at all, then you should consult the very rich literature on "isolating mechanisms" in speciation. You'll find a lot more than "just so" stories if you do.Mimus_{June 26, 2019
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“If the hybrids of such an corssing are unfit then any mechanism that prevents the production of such offspreing is itself a fitness advantage.” This assumes that this would be the case, which is where people start to disagree, you have stated a possible but hypothetical reason, it is a point but not Necessarily true nor does it invalidate the original claim, (many would respond to that with this being evolutionary story telling and hand waving) its simple that it might have happened that way, but we could not know if that really is the case, and a species developing a genetic block to stop such Hybridizations shows a high level of foresight, as most species have developed this for all others species, except for those closely related to its own kind, and given how many duck reproductive systems evolve to prevent reproduction with its own species, I’m less inclined to support that. This also falls into the category of infinite explanatory power of the theory, where it loses validity and prompts “who has their hand on the bat last syndrome” arguments. Now if there was an experiment that could validate it, no problem then and all is well, but it would not prove evolution or ID one way or the other, this could be seen as an attribute of both. I hope the tone of my message was not badAaronS1978_{June 26, 2019
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If species is a group that can breed together but not with other groups, and we see that these species exist – I always saw that as an argument against evolution since evolution should show a fluid continuum of organisms making it impossible to determine species.
You might want to talk to News here, who thinks that fact species cannot be defined in this way is a problem from evolution (although why this should be the case is less clear). BTW, this is not alwasys true
The inability to breed with other organisms would not be a fitness advantage.
If the hybrids of such an corssing are unfit then any mechanism that prevents the production of such offspreing is itself a fitness advantage.Mimus_{June 26, 2019
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I’ve said this before as pointed out by bb and sa Arguing the same points from different perspectives This is why we need nonaggressive calm dialogues and start trying to look at each other’s perspectives with more respect, this goes for everyone (excluding Jerry Coyne just him he is to meat roboty to have an opinion) I’m going to venture a guess about the species stuff and Darwin, I’m pretty sure it stems from the ridiculousness in classification when it comes to Neanderthal and us and whether they really were a separate speciesAaronS1978_{June 26, 2019
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If species is a group that can breed together but not with other groups, and we see that these species exist - I always saw that as an argument against evolution since evolution should show a fluid continuum of organisms making it impossible to determine species. The inability to breed with other organisms would not be a fitness advantage.Silver Asiatic_{June 26, 2019
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GUN@11, I agree. The only mystery is why ID proponents think that the fuzziness of "species" is somehow antithetical to evolution. If anything, this fuzziness is something that would be expected if evolution proceeded as the theory proposes. Any snapshot in time should show "species" that are clearly distinct from their closest relative and can't interbreed, others that still maintain the ability to interbreed and produce viable offspring, and others that can interbreed but produce non-fertile offspring. And this is what we see.Brother Brian_{June 26, 2019
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Brother Brian,
It’s because of a little book written over a century ago. I think it was called “ Origin of Species”
If one actually opens the book, however, it will quickly be apparent that Darwin didn’t believe that “species” have an objective reality, which is why, as he mentions, there are countless definitions of “species”. Darwin believed that “species” originated via natural selection, however one defines the term, but, as he argues throughout Origin of Species, there’s an arbitrariness as where to draw lines in nature. In fact, as far back as his observations of the Galapagos finches, it’s one of the things that convinced him that “species” originated in a gradual way:
Many years ago, when comparing, and seeing others compare, the birds from the closely neighbouring islands of the Galapagos archipelago, one with another, and with those from the American mainland, I was much struck how entirely vague and arbitrary is the distinction between species and varieties.
A common debate between non-evolutionists and evolutionists in the 19th century (and even 18th century) was whether “species” were a real, objective “thing”, or were they a subjective, arbitrary, human construct. Non-evolutionists generally leaned towards the former, and evolutionists towards the latter.goodusername_{June 26, 2019
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@ Seqenenre- Trisomy- I would guess on how meiosis handles it or if it causes reproductive isolation.ET_{June 26, 2019
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How do we classify humans with Down syndrom? If having an extra chromosome still classifies as Homo sapiens then it is obvious that our species concept is rather fluffy. Or are they an intermediate?Seqenenre_{June 26, 2019
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Most of us are accustomed to the Linnaean system of classification that assigns every organism a kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species, which, among other possibilities, has the handy mnemonic King Philip Came Over For Good Soup. This system was created long before scientists understood that organisms evolved. Because the Linnaean system is not based on evolution, most biologists are switching to a classification system that reflects the organisms' evolutionary history.
On that Linnaean system of classification:
The standard system of classification in which every organism is assigned a kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. This system groups organisms into ever smaller and smaller groups (like a series of boxes within boxes, called a nested hierarchy).
And yet we are told by talk origins (Doug Theobald) that only branching evolutionary processes can produce a nested hierarchy- well only because evolutionists don't seem to understand what a nested hierarchy entails. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section1.html#nested_hierarchy And his figure 1 isn't a nested hierarchy.ET_{June 26, 2019
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The weird thing is that if you read the actual article the OP is linking to, it's not about species, it's about higher taxonomic levels. And yeah, they are rather arbitrary.Bob O'H_{June 26, 2019
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Brother Brian:
It’s because of a little book written over a century ago. I think it was called “ Origin of Species”.
The book that never discussed the origin of species.ET_{June 26, 2019
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The difficulties with constructing a universal species concept is hardly a new issue in biology. The Australian philosopher of science John S Wilkins has written about it extensively, including highly-regarded books such as Species: A History of the Idea (2009) and Defining Species: A Sourcebook from Antiquity to Today. (2009) Seversky_{June 26, 2019
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Darwin, because of the reductive materialistic foundation that his theory rested upon, denied that there were any true 'species'. He held the the term species "as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience" and that it "does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms."
“I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again, in comparison with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily, for convenience’s sake.” - Origin of Species: second British edition (1860), page 52
For the Darwinian materialist there can be no real permanence of species assigned in any real classification scheme that one may try to devise since there simply is no permanence of form within reductive materialism itself to build any real classification scheme upon. The failure of the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinian evolution to even be able to explain the basic defining form of any given organism and/or species was touched upon yesterday, in some detail, in my reply to Bob O'Hara,
Thus in conclusion, the ‘bottom up’ reductive materialistic framework of Darwinian evolution is found, from several lines of empirical evidence, to be grossly inadequate for explaining how any particular organism might achieve its basic form. Moreover, to state what should be glaringly obvious, since neo-Darwinian explanations are grossly inadequate for explaining how any particular organism might achieve its basic form, then neo-Darwinian speculations for how one type of organism might transform into another type of organism are based on pure fantasy and have no discernible experimental basis in reality. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/darwinism-must-have-bypassed-chernobyl/#comment-679348
Darwin himself expected that "innumerable transitional forms must have existed" and was befuddled as to "why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?"
"But, as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?" Darwin - chapter 6
These missing innumerable transitional forms that, according to Darwin himself, 'must have existed', are still missing
"Darwin’s prediction of rampant, albeit gradual, change affecting all lineages through time is refuted. The record is there, and the record speaks for tremendous anatomical conservatism. Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record." Niles Eldredge and Ian Tattersall, The Myth of Human Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 45-46. "Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them." David Kitts - Paleontologist - D.B. Kitts, Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory (1974), p. 467. "What is missing are the many intermediate forms hypothesized by Darwin, and the continual divergence of major lineages into the morphospace between distinct adaptive types." Robert L Carroll (born 1938) - vertebrate paleontologist who specialises in Paleozoic and Mesozoic amphibians "Every paleontologist knows that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of family appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences.” George Gaylord Simpson (evolutionist), The Major Features of Evolution, New York, Columbia University Press, 1953 p. 360. “The record certainly did not reveal gradual transformations of structure in the course of time. On the contrary, it showed that species generally remained constant throughout their history and were replaced quite suddenly by significantly different forms. New types or classes seemed to appear fully formed, with no sign of an evolutionary trend by which they could have emerged from an earlier type.” Peter Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 187. Scientific study turns understanding about evolution on its head - July 30, 2013 Excerpt: evolutionary biologists,,, looked at nearly one hundred fossil groups to test the notion that it takes groups of animals many millions of years to reach their maximum diversity of form. Contrary to popular belief, not all animal groups continued to evolve fundamentally new morphologies through time. The majority actually achieved their greatest diversity of form (disparity) relatively early in their histories. ,,,Dr Matthew Wills said: "This pattern, known as 'early high disparity', turns the traditional V-shaped cone model of evolution on its head. What is equally surprising in our findings is that groups of animals are likely to show early-high disparity regardless of when they originated over the last half a billion years. This isn't a phenomenon particularly associated with the first radiation of animals (in the Cambrian Explosion), or periods in the immediate wake of mass extinctions.",,, Author Martin Hughes, continued: "Our work implies that there must be constraints on the range of forms within animal groups, and that these limits are often hit relatively early on. Co-author Dr Sylvain Gerber, added: "A key question now is what prevents groups from generating fundamentally new forms later on in their evolution.,,, http://phys.org/news/2013-07-scientific-evolution.html
And again, for the Darwinian materialist, there are merely "fluctuating forms" and "individuals closely resembling each other". To a reductive materialist, everything is, ultimately, reducible to particles in motion and therefore everything must be constantly in flux. There simply is no real permanence to appeal to within the Darwinian scheme. As Pastor Joe Boot explains, "As the ancient Greeks held, like Democritus and others, the universe is flux. It’s just matter in motion. Now on that basis all you are confronted with is innumerable brute facts that are unrelated pieces of data. They have no meaningful connection to each other because there is no overall structure. There’s no design plan. It’s like my kids do ‘join the dots’ puzzles. It’s just dots, but when you join the dots there is a structure, and a picture emerges. Well, the atheists is without that (final picture). There is no pre-established pattern (to connect the facts given atheism).”
“As the ancient Greeks held, like Democritus and others, the universe is flux. It’s just matter in motion. Now on that basis all you are confronted with is innumerable brute facts that are unrelated pieces of data. They have no meaningful connection to each other because there is no overall structure. There’s no design plan. It’s like my kids do ‘join the dots’ puzzles. It’s just dots, but when you join the dots there is a structure, and a picture emerges. Well, the atheists is without that (final picture). There is no pre-established pattern (to connect the facts given atheism).” Pastor Joe Boot – 13:20 minute mark of the following video Defending the Christian Faith – Pastor Joe Boot – video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqE5_ZOAnKo
This denial of the permanence of form by Darwinists, as Dr. Michael Egnor points out in the following video, is the denial of what is truly real about a species. As he stated, "Form is what makes things real. And what I believe materialism does in modern science is it denies that the form of things is the most important aspect of them."
"Materialism, in my viewpoint, is not even really a philosophical perspective. It's just a mistake. It's like,, claiming 2+2=5 is mathematics. It's not really mathematics. It's just an error. And materialism isn't even sufficiently coherent, in my view, to qualify as a philosophical perspective. The best philosophy originated with the ancient Greeks. Particularly with Aristotle. And what Aristotle proposed, and what really became mainstream metaphysics for such philosophers as Saint Thomas Aquinas, and the scholastic philosophers, is that things that exist in the world are composites of form and matter. And the form is the intelligible aspect of things. And matter is what makes something an individual thing not just sort of a theoretical thing. But the actuallity, the intelligibility, of something is in the form. It's not in the matter. Form is what makes things real. And what I believe materialism does in modern science is it denies that the form of things is the most important aspect of them." Michael Egnor: The (neuro-scientific) Evidence against Materialism - 27:17 minute mark https://youtu.be/BqHrpBPdtSI?t=1637
That is to say, when Darwinian materialists deny 'form', they end up denying that species truly exists. The following article more clearly elucidates what Dr. Egnor is talking about:
Darwin, Design & Thomas Aquinas The Mythical Conflict Between Thomism & Intelligent Design by Logan Paul Gage Excerpt: First, the problem of essences. G. K. Chesterton once quipped that “evolution . . . does not especially deny the existence of God; what it does deny is the existence of man.” It might appear shocking, but in this one remark the ever-perspicacious Chesterton summarized a serious conflict between classical Christian philosophy and Darwinism. In Aristotelian and Thomistic thought, each particular organism belongs to a certain universal class of things. Each individual shares a particular nature—or essence—and acts according to its nature. Squirrels act squirrelly and cats catty. We know with certainty that a squirrel is a squirrel because a crucial feature of human reason is its ability to abstract the universal nature from our sense experience of particular organisms. Think about it: How is it that we are able to recognize different organisms as belonging to the same group? The Aristotelian provides a good answer: It is because species really exist—not as an abstraction in the sky, but they exist nonetheless. We recognize the squirrel’s form, which it shares with other members of its species, even though the particular matter of each squirrel differs. So each organism, each unified whole, consists of a material and immaterial part (form).,,, One way to see this form-matter dichotomy is as Aristotle’s solution to the ancient tension between change and permanence debated so vigorously in the pre-Socratic era. Heraclitus argued that reality is change. Everything constantly changes—like fire, which never stays the same from moment to moment. Philosophers like Parmenides (and Zeno of “Zeno’s paradoxes” fame) argued exactly the opposite; there is no change. Despite appearances, reality is permanent. How else could we have knowledge? If reality constantly changes, how can we know it? What is to be known? Aristotle solved this dilemma by postulating that while matter is constantly in flux—even now some somatic cells are leaving my body while others arrive—an organism’s form is stable. It is a fixed reality, and for this reason is a steady object of our knowledge. Organisms have an essence that can be grasped intellectually. Denial of True Species Enter Darwinism. Recall that Darwin sought to explain the origin of “species.” Yet as he pondered his theory, he realized that it destroyed species as a reality altogether. For Darwinism suggests that any matter can potentially morph into any other arrangement of matter without the aid of an organizing principle. He thought cells were like simple blobs of Jell-O, easily re-arrangeable. For Darwin, there is no immaterial, immutable form. In The Origin of Species he writes: “I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again, in comparison with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily, for convenience’s sake.” Statements like this should make card-carrying Thomists shudder.,,, The first conflict between Darwinism and Thomism, then, is the denial of true species or essences. For the Thomist, this denial is a grave error, because the essence of the individual (the species in the Aristotelian sense) is the true object of our knowledge. As philosopher Benjamin Wiker observes in Moral Darwinism, Darwin reduced species to “mere epiphenomena of matter in motion.” What we call a “dog,” in other words, is really just an arbitrary snapshot of the way things look at present. If we take the Darwinian view, Wiker suggests, there is no species “dog” but only a collection of individuals, connected in a long chain of changing shapes, which happen to resemble each other today but will not tomorrow. What About Man? Now we see Chesterton’s point. Man, the universal, does not really exist. According to the late Stanley Jaki, Chesterton detested Darwinism because “it abolishes forms and all that goes with them, including that deepest kind of ontological form which is the immortal human soul.” And if one does not believe in universals, there can be, by extension, no human nature—only a collection of somewhat similar individuals.,,, Implications for Bioethics This is not a mere abstract point. This dilemma is playing itself out in contemporary debates in bioethics. With whom are bioethicists like Leon Kass (neo-Aristotelian and former chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics) sparring today if not with thoroughgoing Darwinians like Princeton’s Peter Singer, who denies that humans, qua humans, have intrinsic dignity? Singer even calls those who prefer humans to other animals “speciesist,” which in his warped vocabulary is akin to racism.,,, If one must choose between saving an intelligent, fully developed pig or a Down syndrome baby, Singer thinks we should opt for the pig.,,, https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=23-06-037-f
There is much more that could be said on this topic, but for now I will conclude with the fact that for a Darwinist to pretend that he can build any realistic classification scheme of species upon his reductive materialistic framework is a futile exercise in self delusion. There simply is no permanence of form within his Darwinian classification scheme that he can appeal to so as to give his proposed classification scheme a coherent and solid foundation.
Matthew 7 26 And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. 27 And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”
bornagain77_{June 26, 2019
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BB I think you have missed the point. Species concept was there long before Darwin; he fossilised the species concept, trying to be another Linnaeus. Over decades biologists have tried to define species, still are.Belfast_{June 26, 2019
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Minus
Biologists have always accepted that no single species concept describes all of biology. Why you can’t learn this simple fact I do not know.
It’s because of a little book written over a century ago. I think it was called “ Origin of Species”. Or something like that.Brother Brian_{June 25, 2019
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... some are beginning to notice the problem.
Here's Dobzhansky referring to the fact no one can agree on a species concept in 1935. Biologists have always accepted that no single species concept describes all of biology. Why you can't learn this simple fact I do not know.Mimus_{June 25, 2019
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