Species concepts (and subspecies)

[Kenelm Philip]

	After Andy Warren's interesting posting, I thought it might be time
to add the following to the discussion. This is a quote from John C. Fran-
clemont's Introduction to MONA fascicle 20.1, and presents a view of sub-
species (from 1973) that runs closer to Jim Kruse's and my own ideas on
this vexed topic:

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  I have always been interested in zoogeography and the geographical vari-
ation among the populations of a species and the variation within a given
population. After an early fling in the late nineteen-thirties and the very
early nineteen-forties at giving names to geographical variants and to the
more or less constant variants within populations, I decided that the names
did not advance the understanding of the processes by which the variants
came into being and were maintained; in fact, I came to believe that the
names were an unnecessary encumbrance and that they prejudiced thinking by
fostering preconceived ideas. Furthermore, too much timne has been wasted
on trying to assemble data, much of it illusory, to maintain already pro-
posed names for subspecies.
  In any species with an essentially continuous continental distribution
the limits of the ranges of the geographical races, subspecies, are, more
often than not, arbitrary, and usually only one or a very few characters
are or can be used to define the race because the variation in the char-
acter states within and among populations of a species is not concordant
and is in many instances more in the nature of tendencies or clines than
absolute differences. Further, often only isolated samples are available,
and in too many instances one or a very few specimens constitute the sample
that is used as the basis for a diagnosis and a description; in either case
it is a wholly inadequate representation upon which to base conclusions in
a study of geographic variation. The ranges of island populations, in both
the literal and the figurative senses, are often easier to demarcate be-
cause true islands are separated by water barriers, and other island-like
habitats, such as the higher elevations of mountain ranges, are separated
by intervening land masses that are untenable by the species. However, the
diagnostic characters are often no more clear-cut than those for the pop-
ulations of continuously distributed species.
  A final observation, I believe that in manu groups of moths some of the
subspecies and forms recognized at present will prove on study to be dis-
crete species...
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	This view is not concordant with the ideas of many people currently
working on butterflies, as many recent postings here have shown. But moths
and butterflies are, in essence, the same thing--and someone with the
experience of Franclemont is worth listening to.

							Ken Philip
fnkwp at uaf.edu




 
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