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Genes, Categories, and Species: The Evolutionary and Cognitive Cause of the Species Problem | 
 enlarge | Author: Jody Hey
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Buy New: $67.00
New (11) Used (9) from $5.01
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 240
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.9
ISBN: 0195144775
Dewey Decimal Number: 576.86
EAN: 9780195144772
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
In Genes, Categories and Species, Jody Hey provides an enlightening new solution to one of biology's most ironic and perplexing puzzles.
When Darwin showed that life evolves, and that it does so by natural selection, he transformed our understanding of living things. But the very question Darwin addressed-the nature of species-continues to pose an awkward conundrum for biologists. Despite enormous efforts by a great many scholars, biologists still cannot agree on how to identify species or even how to define the word "species."
Genes, Categories, and Species is not like other books on the species problem, for it does not begin by asking, "What is a species?" Instead, it focuses on the very fact that biologists are stumped by species and their curious behavior in coping with that uncertainty.
Faced with a persistent conundrum-and no lack of data on the subject-biologists who ponder the species problem have ceased to ask the most essential of scientific questions: "What new information do we need to resolve the problem?" This is the question that motivates this book and leads to the discoveries it reveals. The answer to the species problem lies not with the processes and patterns of biological diversity, Hey contends, but rather in the way the human mind perceives and categorizes that diversity.
The promise of this book is twofold. First, it allows biologists to understand the causes of the species problem and to use this knowledge to avoid the major confusions that arise over species. Second, with its explanation of the species problem, it gives scholars and students of human nature a humbling example of how ill-suited the human mind is for certain kinds of scientific questions.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Do you want to stop suffering "the species problem"? September 1, 2001
10 out of 12 found this review helpful
Jody Hey's book provides an answer to a problem that has plagued biologists over the past century. Biologists have been suffering "the species problem": how can we come up with a definition for biological species? The word "species" is famous and incredibly popular. Biologists, and newspapers and magazines use the word daily, nature lovers and conservationsist love to count them, and of course Darwin wrote the book that shook the world with "species" in the title. As biologists we have had a burning passion to paint a tidy picture in words to exactly capture what species are. The debate has paraded over numerous books, and has taken up very much journal space. Yet there is no agreement on exactly what a species is! Jody Hey, a theoretical and empirical biologist, has come up with a convincing answer. Hey has weaved together philosophical, psychological, anthropological, and biological information (down to the genetic level) to show us how we have been trying to define the undefinable. Humans love to delineate recurrent patterns in our world, and put them in neat categories. But our categorization process is a very human thing and it has limitations for how we see our world. The species problem, Jody Hey describes, is like "trying to put clouds into boxes." Jody Hey shows us that 'species' are unreal, but that there are things out there in our biological worlds that are real, though fuzzy. These are "evolutionary groups." They are real because evolutionary forces have acted on them in the past, and continue to act on them in the present. Biologists must become comfortable with the notion that biological nature is fuzzy and stop looking for pithy definitions of "species". In this way we can get on with studying the really interesting problems -- how evolutionary processes work.
If you are a person interested in discovering how human thinking (and language) can distort our picture of the world, then this book provides a fascinating account. If you are a biologist who uses the word "species", this book is ESSENTIAL reading.
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