Customer Reviews

Genes, Categories, and Species: The Evolutionary and Cognitive Cause of the Species Problem

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Jody Hey's book provides an answer to a problem that has plagued biologists over the past century. Biologists have been suffering "the species problem": how can we come up with a definition for biological species? The word "species" is famous and incredibly popular. Biologists, and newspapers and magazines use the word daily, nature lovers and conservationsist love to count them, and of course Darwin wrote the book that shook the world with "species" in the title. As biologists we have had a burning passion to paint a tidy picture in words to exactly capture what species are. The debate has paraded over numerous books, and has taken up very much journal space. Yet there is no agreement on exactly what a species is! Jody Hey, a theoretical and empirical biologist, has come up with a convincing answer. Hey has weaved together philosophical, psychological, anthropological, and biological information (down to the genetic level) to show us how we have been trying to define the undefinable. Humans love to delineate recurrent patterns in our world, and put them in neat categories. But our categorization process is a very human thing and it has limitations for how we see our world. The species problem, Jody Hey describes, is like "trying to put clouds into boxes." Jody Hey shows us that 'species' are unreal, but that there are things out there in our biological worlds that are real, though fuzzy. These are "evolutionary groups." They are real because evolutionary forces have acted on them in the past, and continue to act on them in the present. Biologists must become comfortable with the notion that biological nature is fuzzy and stop looking for pithy definitions of "species". In this way we can get on with studying the really interesting problems -- how evolutionary processes work.
If you are a person interested in discovering how human thinking (and language) can distort our picture of the world, then this book provides a fascinating account. If you are a biologist who uses the word "species", this book is ESSENTIAL reading.