ABSTRACT
Like technology, species are all around us, an intrinsic part of how we interact with the world. But there is a gap in communication between species as most people experience them, walking outdoors or examining an organism in a laboratory, compared to the conception of species by the experts who identify and name new taxa, and perhaps different again to people who consider species evolution or the basis of species in the philosophy of science. Discovering and describing species has been an active pursuit of scholars through the whole history of science. The Darwinian revolution shifted toward a general awareness that species are not xed essences, but rather they change through evolutionary time. This creates a conundrum, where species and species groups are dened by observations that are mostly xed in geological time, but we expect them to apply to the long-term evolutionary trajectories of an ever-changing thing. This is an issue of evolutionary theory that has substantial consequences in the experience of other branches of science.
