Kollár Jan, Poulíčková Aloisie, Dvořák Petr
Department of Botany, Faculty of Science, Palacký University Olomouc, Olomouc, Czech Republic.
Mol Ecol. 2022 Jan;31(2):411-418. doi: 10.1111/mec.16218. Epub 2021 Oct 18.
For centuries, both scientists and philosophers have discussed the nature of species resulting in c. 35 species concepts proposed to date. However, in our opinion, none of them incorporated neither recent advances in evolutionary genomics nor dimensionality of species in befitting depth. Our attempt to do so resulted in the following conclusions. Due to the continuous nature of evolution (regardless of its rate and constancy), species are inevitably undefinable as natural discontinuous units (except those originating in saltatory speciation) whenever the time dimension is taken into consideration. Therefore, the very existence of species as a natural discontinuous entity is relative to its dimensionality. A direct consequence of the relativity of species is the duality of speciators (e.g., incipient species) meaning that, in a given time, they may be perceived as both being and not being a species. Finally, the most accurate way to reflect both the relativity of species and the duality of speciators in species delimitation is probabilistic. While the novelty of these ideas may be questionable, they still deserve more extensive attention from the biological community. Here, we hope to draw such attention by outlining one of the possible pathways towards a new kind of probabilistic species delimitation methods based on the probability of irreversible divergence of evolutionary lineages. We anticipate that our probabilistic view of speciation has the potential to facilitate some of the most serious and universal issues of current taxonomy and to ensure unity of the species-level taxonomy across the tree of life.
几个世纪以来，科学家和哲学家都在探讨物种的本质，迄今为止已提出了约35种物种概念。然而，在我们看来，这些概念都没有充分纳入进化基因组学的最新进展，也没有对物种的维度进行恰当深入的探讨。我们尝试这样做后得出了以下结论。由于进化具有连续性（无论其速率和稳定性如何），只要考虑时间维度，物种就不可避免地无法被定义为自然的不连续单元（盐跃式物种形成产生的物种除外）。因此，物种作为自然不连续实体的存在本身与其维度相关。物种相对性的一个直接后果是物种形成者（如初始物种）的二元性，这意味着在给定时间内，它们可能既被视为是一个物种，又被视为不是一个物种。最后，在物种界定中反映物种相对性和物种形成者二元性的最准确方法是概率性的。虽然这些观点的新颖性可能值得怀疑，但它们仍然值得生物学界给予更广泛的关注。在此，我们希望通过概述一种基于进化谱系不可逆分歧概率的新型概率性物种界定方法的可能途径之一来引起这种关注。我们预计，我们对物种形成的概率性观点有潜力促进当前分类学中一些最严重和普遍的问题的解决，并确保整个生命树中物种水平分类的统一性。
