What is the role of Charles Darwin in concept of species
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Answer:
There is a standard but false view, historically speaking, that Darwin shifted naturalists’ attention from defining characters to variability (often referred to as the change from “essentialistic thinking” to “population thinking”).
In fact, this is the exact inverse of what happened. Darwin attended closely to an already extant research program on variability in species, one which had begun at the end of the eighteenth century. He, like any other naturalist, especially botanists, knew that species could not be defined, and his treatment of species was pretty much the same as everybody else’s. He even says that his taxonomic process was not affected by his evolutionary theories.
The ruling view of species at his time was that of Cuvier’s: individuals which descend from similar organisms (see my Species: The Evolution of the Idea, Second Edition). Though Cuvier was a species fixist, Darwin’s view did not differ, except that, unlike Cuvier, he did not think species were of a different kind to varieties, just somewhat more permanent.
Also, Darwin did not, contrary to common opinion, think species were unreal. Instead he thought they were transient, but real.
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