Defining ‘Species,’ ‘Biodiversity,’ and ‘Conservation’ by Their Transitive Relation

Abstract

Definitions offer meanings of words by way of associations with other terms [2, 3]. Accord‐ ingly, a definition relates a concept to a name [4]. Like any field of science, precision of communication in biology is dependent upon the use of terms, while actions taken as conse‐ quences of the acceptance of those terms are constrained by definitions. The importance of the meanings of words is especially critical when actions in one subfield of biology are dependent on terms developed in other subfields. A case in point involves the terms species, biodiversity, and conservation. With a voluminous literature regarding what species are supposed to be, the topic has suffered from an overemphasis on ‘species concepts’ that are largely detached from more inclusive biological systematics principles (e.g. [5]) required to answer the question ‘What is a species?’ While upwards of 26 species ‘concepts’ are recognized [6‒8], there is inconsistency among these in that they either refer to causal or acausal constructs. Causal characterizations typically present species as entities involved in past events, whereas acausal accounts refer to differentially shared features of organisms. Wilkins [8: p58, emphasis original] refers to causal-based concepts as indicating “what species are,” and acausal concepts as “how we identify species.” The implication of either perspective leans toward species being

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.