Species are individuals: Theoretical foundations for the claim
Philosophy of Science 52 (4):578-590 (1985)
| Abstract | This paper shows that species are individuals with respect to evolutionary theory in the sense that the laws of the theory deal with species as irreducible wholes rather than as sets of organisms. 'Species X' is an instantiation of a primitive term of the theory. I present a sketch of a proof that it cannot be defined within the theory as a set of organisms; the proof relies not on details of my axiomatization but rather on a generally accepted property of speciation; hence the same argument should work for any axiomatization which captures this generally accepted property of speciation | |||||||||
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