Conceptualization of the species problem

Abstract

The species problem is understood as a result of the contradiction between aspiration and inability to reduce diversity of species conceptions (SCs) to a single one. Any SC represents the natural spe-cies phenomenon in a certain cognitive situation and serves as a heuristic model of this phenomenon in the latter. SCs of various levels of generality emerge as a result of sequential multiple reduction cascade; the more reduction steps lead to a particular SC, the less it is adequate to the natural species phenomenon. The entire array of SCs can be represented by a conceptual pyramid, within which various SCs occur as particular interpretations of more general (inclusive) concepts and have no sense without contexts imposed by them. It is suggested that, in order to define natural “species in general,” a certain concept of biota should be fixed at the top of conceptual pyramid allowing to dis-tinguish between species and non-species (such as life form, syntaxa, guilds) phenomena. The on-tology of the natural species phenomenon is presumably determined by its essence, viz. species-hood. The latter is a part of the entire natural history of organisms, so its manifestations are group-specific and evolve with the evolutionary development of the structure of biota.