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Morphological Species Concept Essay

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Summary We are living in a century of revolution and great advancements in many fields of biology. These advancements and discoveries are for improving accuracy in different traditional methods or approaches. However, in the field of taxonomy, the problem regarding species concept has never been solved since early 1700s and some biologists still thinks this is impossible. Due to different views, beliefs and descriptions amongst biologists, many species concepts has been proposed, each with it is merits and limitations but there is no single accepted definition of a species. Morphological species concept is the traditional concept that has been used to identify and classify species accordingly. However, discoveries and advancements in molecular biology (genomics) has caused some controversies and conflicts as it produces results that are incongruent to those obtained when applied morphological species concept. Although morphological species concept has unique advantages over other species concept such as pertinency to museum/herbarium specimens, fossil species, it also simple and cost effective and uses ontogenetic information, cryptic species and homology are still not accommodated by this concept. According to some studies, incorporating genetic and morphological data (integration …show more content…

Why should we still proceed to use morphological species concept? The most obligating reason to proceed collecting morphological data advance to the future is to settle the phylogenetic correlations of fossil taxa as well as their ‘kinship’ to existing taxa (Scotland et al., 2003). Therefore, the rebuilt Tree of Life must accommodate fossil taxa. According to some approximations, nearly 99% of the evolved species are currently extinct and their majority were ecologically vital, diverse and very different from existing congeners (Wiens, 2004). Current and future relationships of many fossil taxa can only be ascertained by phylogenetic analysis of morphological data (Mallet,

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