What is a species?

What is a species?

1. A standard definition provided by biologists including evolutionists is a species is a group of individuals that can interbreed and produce fertile offspring.

2. But how accurate is this? For instance:

   a. There are microorganisms such as various bacteria that don't interbreed but rather reproduce asexually. They can share their DNA (or RNA) directly with one another.

   b. Likewise many if not most plants reproduce asexually.

   c. Many insects, fish, amphibians, and reptiles reproduce by parthenogenesis (e.g. the New Mexico whiptail lizard).

   d. There are some organisms that are heterogamous, which means they can alternate back and forth between sexual reproduction and parthenogenesis.

   e. Also, ring species highlight further issues in defining a species.

3. As such, what a species is can vary depending on what organisms we're attempting to study (e.g. bacteria, viruses, fish, primates).

4. What's more, there are likewise different methods to investigate what a species is (e.g. nuclear DNA analysis, mitochondrial DNA analysis, morphological analysis). It's possible different methods can at times yield different and possibly conflicting results.

5. At any rate, there are many other issues involved. But there's no need for me to make the case. Secular scientists including evolutionists have said much the same. Just check out this article for instance.

6. If we amalgamate definitions of a species together, then we may come closer to understanding what an organism is in its fullness. I suppose it'd be a sort of multiperspectival approach to biology.

7. Speaking a bit more fundamentally, though, the concept of a species is a human construct.

   As such, the concept(s) of a species is a concept we've in a sense imposed on living organisms in order to better categorize and understand them.

   Of course, there's nothing inherently problematic with doing this.

   But again doing this doesn't necessarily fully capture nature. It reflects nature only to the degree we are capable of describing nature, and describing nature consummate with our own minds.

8. It'd be good to keep this in mind when evolutionists talk about evolutionary concepts like speciation.

   Not to mention when applied to alleged human species (e.g. Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalis, Homo erectus).

   As an example, a recent article published in Science has made a fairly big splash in evolutionary biology by suggesting that there may have been even less human species than we had previously thought. How malleable is our understanding of what constitutes a species?

   We can study modern organisms not only based on their skeletal structure, for instance, but based on their flesh and blood anatomy, their behavior, and much else besides.

   Studying other aspects of an organism besides its morphology like its behavior can give us important insight into the organism. Is it possible, for example, that by studying animal behavior we can come to reliable scientific conclusions about the animal that, say, morphology couldn't arrive at, or that morphology could mistakenly conclude?

   Of course, we can't study organisms which are no longer around for us to study. Such as Neanderthals.

   Given all this, are our fundamentally skeletal morphology based conclusions about no longer extant creatures like Neanderthals reliable? If we could observe Neanderthal behavior, would we conclude the same things we conclude about Neanderthals now (e.g. they are a separate human species)?

9. At any rate, it seems to me what a species is, is at best shades of grey rather black and white. It seems to me there's considerable vagueness, contrary to what evolutionists like Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne wish to present to the public.