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Page 4 · DO #962 · 319_Love_Bx1FF7r
- Collection
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Áskell Löve (1916–1994) papers
- Item/Folder
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"Outlines for Books and Articles to be Published but Never Completed" (3 of 3)
- Digital Object
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DO #962,
page 4
- Collection-level dates
- 1950–1987
Page transcription
Plant taxonomy is a classical subject with a long history, but it is also a field strongly affected by the theory of evolution, because most modern taxonomists agree that a system of biological classification ought to reflect the actual history of the evolution of taxa at various taxonomic levels. Until 1930, only theoretical understanding of evolutionary processes leading to the increase in diversity at the level of species were supposed to be the ones as those leading to the conservation of gene pools at above the levels of species, exactly as believed by Darwin. This has been used as an argument for the almost universal belief that species are so many kinds as to make a universal definition of them impossible and so allowing the acceptance of categories based on feeling rather than facts. In 1930, however, the first evidence of a cyto geneticist making a very detailed study of inheritance between within a very species of certain plant genera, discovered that the evolving process leading to diversity is fundamentally distinct from that leading to reproductive isolation, which is the classical characteristic of species. Thousands of later experiments have confirmed this assertion, which opened the door to clearly biological and exact definition of the species and the categories below it, i.e. the level of reproductive isolation at which an evolving species begins.
