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Species are Individuals: Theoretical Foundations for the Claim

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Mary B. Williams
Mary B. Williams*
Affiliation:
Center for Science and Culture, University of Delaware
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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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , December 1985 , pp. 578 - 590
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Work on this paper has been supported by NSF grant SES-8206141.

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