ABSTRACT
A historically important variant of the realist position considered species to be the primordial created entities. Species, or race, or some other category is declared the archetypal entity, and individuals its transitory and imperfect incarnations. Race, species, genus are categories of taxa in the hierarchical classification of organisms. Taxonomic species will be most meaningful if they are made to correspond to the biological species. The category of species has a particular and unique biological meaning because speciation is one of the basic evolutionary processes. Two types of evolutionary changes, anagenesis and cladogenesis, may usefully be distinguished. Anagenesis is change in time without diversification; cladogenesis is splitting and branching of an ancestral form into two or several derived ones. The two interpretations of hominid evolution assume, cladogenesis on both the specific and generic levels, or race differentiation on the intra-specific level only. Anagenetic as well as cladogenetic changes have been taking place in hominid evolution.
