The naming of new species in hominin evolution: A radical proposal—A temporary cessation in assigning new names

Abstract

The species problem is one of the most complex and enduring problems plaguing evolutionary biology in general and human paleontology in particular. In the past 50 years, conceptions of species have diverged and speciated analogous to the present, largely accepted view of the hominin phylogeny. Conventional wisdom supports a “bushy” hominin phylogeny. However, chaos reigns because there is no agreed-upon methodology used to delimit species taxa in paleontology. This dispute is complicated by the ever-present intraspecific and interspecific morphological variation, which is itself exacerbated by other types of variation, including behavioral, ecological, geographical and temporal. When two or more of these forms of variation are used to delimit “new” extant or fossil species, any decision arrived at might be construed as arbitrary. This paper proposes that temporary cessation in assigning new names should be considered based on several critical problems: (1) the explosion of conceptions of a “species” arising from disagreements regarding species definitions, (2) differing interpretations of population variation, which lead to difficulty in interpreting hybridization in nature, leading in turn to the underestimation or overestimation of species, (3) the problem of modes of speciation being confounded with criteria used to distinguish among species, e.g., punctuated equilibrium posits high-speciation rates, and (4) the most common of all human traits, vanity.