[Populational speciation or chromosomal speciation? About the book of Jean de Grouchy "From the birth of species to the aberrations of life" (author's transl)].

According to Jean de Grouchy, the emergence of a new species is dependent on an "acceptable" chromosomic rearrangement, which passing from the heterozygous state (in the original bearer) to the homozygous state (in some of his enbred offspring) becomes definitively established and creates a population sexually isolated from its acestors. He is thus using the idea of karyotype to develop the typological theory put forward at the beginning of the century which postulates that a single mutant is at the origin of a new species. Although he gives an important place to chromosomic rearrangements in the sexual isolation of a new species, J. Ruffié demonstrates by arguments taken from population genetics and from the immunological polymorphism of wild populations that speciation is almost always the result of the evolution of an entire group, which, because of geographic isolation, drift, and differential selection, diverges from the ancestral branch and finally becomes totally incapable of breeding with it. He proposes a model of speciation which includes the two processes population and cytologic. At a first step, the group is isolated geographically and continues its independent evolution; the second step consists of chromosomic recombinations which render the sexual isolation complete. The modifications of the karyotype make the process of speciation irreversible.