Moth



Blackwell Publishing

The idea of a species - What are the reproductive species concepts?

"Where we have sexual reproduction a species can be objectively defined as a group of organisms which reproduce sexually amongst themselves but don't reproduce with members of other species.

Where we don't have sexual reproduction - as in asexual species, or in fossils where we have no idea of how they reproduced - then there is no objective definition of the species, and the species just becomes like the genus, the family or the class. It's subject to arbitrary human decision."

Richard Dawkins

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