While neither universally applicable nor practical operationally, the biological species concept continues to offer a compelling framework for studying species and speciation

• 作者: Lexuan Gao Loren H.Rieseberg
• 来源期刊: 国家科学评论（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2020,（8）
• 页码范围: 1398-1400
• 页数: 3页
• 语种: 英文
• DOI: 10.1093/nsr/nwaa108

摘要

Few topics in evolutionary biology have received as much scrutiny and debate as the nature of species and species concepts.This is partly because species are central to many fields of biology (but especially evolution, ecology, systematics, and conservation biology), and there does not appear to be a single concept that can satisfy the needs of these different disciplines [1].A related issue is that the nature of species varies widely across the domains of life due to differences in mode of reproduction (sexual versus asexual), life cycle, generation time, mating system, vagility, genome architecture, geographic range size, and a host of other features [2].Species concepts that can accommodate this natural diversity [3,4] offer little guidance regarding how to delimit species, study their origins and evolution, or predict their evolutionary fate.As a consequence, users of species concepts typically choose the concept that suits their specific requirements, often with the recognition that their favored concept has known flaws, lacks universality or both.