Are Species Real? An Essay on the Metaphysics of Species, by Matthew Slater.

Abstract

This book addresses the recent and extensive debates about the nature, metaphysics, and reality of biological species. The main claims of this book are: First, species are not natural kinds but some species have ‘natural kindness’, a status based on the degree to which they correspond to ‘stable property clusters’ (SPC). Second, species terms do not properly refer to either sets of things or spatio-temporally located individuals, but to multiple organisms. The author thereby rejects both of the major positions about the metaphysics of species, arguing that these metaphysical views are both problematic and unnecessary. The analysis here differs in some ways, but is an extension and development of some of the views developed by Philip Kitcher (the author’s dissertation supervisor), in his ‘pluralistic realism’. The introductory chapter lays out a fundamental assumption of the author’s approach, the role that species taxa play in inductive inference and explanation. The idea is that by identifying the species of an organism, and taking into account background information, we thereby license a variety of generalizations. If an individual organism is a panda, for instance, we can make generalizations about what it eats. And the fact that it is a panda also explains its trophic behaviour.