Taking Our Lumps

摘要

In his review on darwin's effect on Hooker's theories on lumping or splitting species ("Lumpers and splitters: Darwin, Hooker, and the search for order," 11 December 2009, p. 1496), J. Endersby appears to be a lumper himself. He fails to distinguish between the goals of taxonomy and population biology. The former seeks to recognize the results of evolutionary history based on constantly distributed characters, each of which is an hypothesis in its own right (1).