2.

1 Species as Taxa and Species as Evolutionary Groups In his thought-provoking book on the
problem of species, Hey (2001) suggests a logical distinction between species as taxa and
species as evolutionary groups. This was later picked up by Zachos (2016) in his book on
the same topic, who called them T-species and E-species respectively. However, much
earlier, in his discussion of the concept of type in taxonomy, G. G. Simpson also outlined
a similar view (Simpson 1940) during the second phase of the Modern Synthesis (Junker
2004) when speciation emerged as a major topic of theoretical discussion. (eg Dobzhansky
1937: Huxley 1940, 1942; Mayr 1942; Simpson 1944; Rensch 1947; Stebbins 1950).
The taxonomic species (T-species) is derived from the cognitive concept (Atran 1990,
1999; Berlin 1992) of the type of organism (oak, tiger, date palm). They are subjective
mental constructs with certain characteristics derived from the intuitive tools that humans
use to form group concepts, e.g. blurred boundaries, typicals, and degrees of membership
of included individuals (Smith and Medin 1981; Murphy 2002; Gärdenfors 2014; Hannan
et al. 2019).
T-species are subjective both in the sense that they are mental concepts and in the sense
that each of us has a personal and intuitive idea of what they represent. Simpson (1940:414)
puts forward this view as follows: A species, as it is actually defined or diagnosed and
used in the literature is a subjective concept. The usual theory, often questioned but
believed by me and by most taxonomists, is that this concept more or less corresponds to
a real thing in nature, a group of individual animals that are really related in a way that
makes them a natural unit of a sphere. certain estimates. Objects in this realm could be
considered a native species, but not