General Knowledge

Perhaps the single most important message of this book is that boundaries in nature are fuzzy. The Tree of Life is a fractal pattern with lineages nested within lineages. “Carving up nature at its joints” is therefore a messy business. Also, many phenomena relevant to species definition and delimitation (such as interbreeding, sexuality, similarity, allopatry, etc.) are continua, making concrete cut-off criteria within a grey area necessarily somewhat arbitrary. Much of the confusion we are facing with species is therefore an authentic representation of nature’s underlying fuzziness. Taxonomy is a discrete ordering system imposed upon the continuous (and fractal) structure of the Tree of Life. A perfect match of the two is impossible.