The species in primatology

Abstract

Biologists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries all bandied about the term "species," but very rarely actually said what they meant by it. Often, however, one can get inside their thinking by piecing together some of their remarks. One of the most nearly explicit-appropriately, for the man who wrote a book called The Origin of Species - was Charles Darwin[]: "Practically, when a naturalist can unite two forms together by others having intermediate characters, he treats the one as a variety of the other... He later translated this into evolutionary terms: "Hereafter, we shall be compelled to acknowledge that the only distinction between species and well-marked varieties is, that the latter are known, or believed, to be connected at the present day by intermediate gradations, whereas species were formerly thus connected.