Now, I want to talk about species concepts. I'm going to get into the heart of the science of this talk. Why are species concepts so important? Well, there are entities out there in nature. All science, all theories in science say something about things out in nature. They describe the behavior of those things, how those things interact with one another. So, species are the things, the basic things, of systematics, of natural science, really. And we want to say something about those entities because if we use those entities in theory, if we think species evolve or if we think species compete or if they are involved in processes, we better individuate - that is discriminate-those entities correctly. We can't discriminate fictitious things.

One example I always use is to consider that I have a theory of planetary motion and I'm going to talk about Pluto, maybe. I'm going to talk about the earth, the moon, Io, Alpha Centari, and you say wait, wait, those aren't all planets. I've individuated the entities of my theory incorrectly. So I'll do my theory and it may look really great but if my individual entities are all wrong, it may appear that there's something wrong with the theory. Generally, predictions from that theory will come back and also show you that you're doing something wrong about individuation. It's very, very important to make those entities and theories comparable with one another. So we don't want fictitious things.

Different species concepts give you a different outlook on nature. They individuate nature's entities in different ways. That's why we've been fighting about these concepts for literally hundreds of years. And we still do, every few months or so, a new book comes out arguing about species.

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