What, if Anything, are Species?

Abstract

where he teaches about island biology, biodiversity, evolution, and phylogenetic analysis. His research interests are in the ecology and evolutionary biology of bryophytes (mosses and liverworts), as well as the theory of phylogenetic systematics. He has been heavily involved in developing electronic resources to present taxonomic and distributional information about plants to the public, with applications to conservation concerns. He has most recently been involved in developing new "spatial phylogenetic" tools for studying biodiversity and endemism using large-scale phylogenies and collection data in a geographic and statistical framework.

The Genetic Variability of Indonesian Local Foxtail Millet Accession Based on Agro-morphological Traits and Early Salinity Tolerance Evaluation Utilizing SiDREB2-based SNAP Marker

“…Firdaus et al (2020) reported that among 23 Indonesian foxtail millet accessions evaluated, only two showed waxy endosperm, namely ICERI-2 and Padang accessions. In this study, Indonesian local foxtail millet accessions were predicted to be derived from the same clan (monophyletic), meaning they were all derived from the same ancestor (Mishler 2021). The ICERI-6 has a longer clade size, indicating that these accessions appear earlier than other local accessions (Fitmawati and Hartana 2010).…”

Cell types as species: Exploring a metaphor

“…Some of the authors of the Clevers et al (2017) poll of definitions of cell type appear to subscribe to the nominalist position that "cell type" is an arbitrary designation, and that only cell states exist. This echoes the position of some systematists that lineages are real, whereas species are arbitrary (Vaux et al, 2016;Mishler, 2021). But most cell biologists see a real distinction between cell types, which are "hard-wired, " and cell states, which are "soft-wired" (Arendt et al, 2016(Arendt et al, , 2019Morris, 2019).…”

Trials and tribulations of Neotropical plant taxonomy: Pace of tree species description

“…Naming living organisms is a fundamental step in the process of inventorying, using, and conserving biological diversity. Throughout the history of biology, profound conceptual and technical changes have transformed the practice of identifying and naming species (Mishler, 2021 and references therein). Early species concepts used typological approaches that relied on key characters to identify species.…”

“…Modern approximations consider multiple properties such as diagnosability, monophyly, and distribution, as lines of evidence that identify species as distinct lineages (unified species concept, de Queiroz, 2007). More recently, it has been suggested that species could be defined using heuristic (Wells et al, 2022) or pluralistic (Mishler, 2021) approaches, in which patterns of genetic, morphological, and ecological variation intrinsic to each group of organisms are assessed in a case by case scenario, without attempting to apply a universal set of criteria to define all species. Using multiple lines of evidence has contributed to considering taxonomy not only as the practice of naming and classifying organisms, but also as a bona fide scientific discipline in which species are testable and falsifiable hypotheses.…”