2 Taxonomy is always a contentious issue because the world does not come to us in neat little packages (S. Personality has been conceptualized from a variety of theoretical perspectives, and at various levels of Each of these levels has made unique contributions to our understanding of individual differences in behavior and experience. However, the number of personality traits, and scales designed to measure them, escalated without an end in sight (Goldberg, 1971). Researchers, as well as practitioners in the field of personality assessment, were faced with a bewildering array of personality scales from which to choose, with little guidance and no overall rationale at hand. What made matters worse was that scales with the same name often measure concepts that are not the same, and scales with different names often measure concepts that are quite similar. Although diversity and scientific pluralism are useful, the systematic accumulation of findings and the communication among researchers became difficult amidst the Babel of concepts and scales. Many personality researchers had hoped that they might devise the structure that would transform the Babel into a community speaking a common language. However, such an integration was not to be achieved by any one researcher or by any one theoretical perspective. As Allport once put it, " each assessor has his own pet units and uses a pet battery of diagnostic devices " (1958, p. 258). What personality psychology needed was a descriptive model, or taxonomy, of its subject matter. One of the central goals of scientific taxonomies is the definition of overarching domains within which large numbers of specific instances can be understood in a simplified way. Thus, in personality psychology, a taxonomy would permit researchers to study specified domains of personality characteristics, rather than examining separately the thousands of particular attributes that make human beings individual and unique. Moreover, a generally accepted taxonomy would greatly facilitate the accumulation and communication of empirical findings by offering a standard vocabulary, or nomenclature. After decades of research, the field is approaching consensus on a general taxonomy of personality traits, the " Big Five " personality dimensions. These dimensions do not represent a particular theoretical perspective but were derived from analyses of the natural-language terms people use to describe themselves 3 and others. Rather than replacing all previous systems, the Big Five taxonomy serves an integrative function because it can represent the various and diverse systems of personality …

The Big Five Trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical perspectives.

Paradigm shift to the integrative Big Five trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and conceptual issues.

https://www2.clarku.edu/faculty/dhibbett/Reprints%20PDFs/Taylor%20et%20al%202000%20FGB.pdf

Phylogenetic Species Recognition and Species Concepts in Fungi

Fluctuating asymmetry, discussed below, is commonly used to estimate the effects of minor developmental accidents. These accidents differ between individuals, and there are also individual differences in resistance to these accidents. The ability to resist such developmental accidents will here be referred to as buffering against them. Because of the interrelations of morphogenetic systems, it is possible that an organism well buffered in one character is also well buffered in others, i.e., for this reason the microenvironmental perturbations on different systems in an individual may result in a tendency for the fluctuating asymmetry of different characters in that individual to be higher or lower than usual. Such a correlation in buffering capacities could also-be produced by differences in genotypes and environments acting separately'on different morphogenetic systems, but this is another matter. This investigation concerns the fluctuating asymmetry of different characters. No new evidence is given as to buffering against environmental stresses of a larger scale, such as temperature or the presence of parasites. A mean positive correlation between the fluctuating asymmetries of a number of un-

A study of fluctuating asymmetry

Speciation, the process through which new species come into being, is one of the central topics of evolutionary biology. It links the great fields of microand macroevolutionary biology and intersects a wide variety of related biological disciplines, including behavioral biology, ecology, genetics, morphology, paleontology, physiology, reproductive biology, and systematics. For this reason, a persistent controversy regarding the definition of the term species may seem disconcerting. The continual proposal of new species definitions-commonly characterized as alternative species concepts-seems to suggest that there is no general agreement about what species are, and if this is the case, then the possibility of understanding how species come into being also seems unlikely. At the very least, there seems to be considerable potential for misinterpretation and confusion about what different biologists mean when they talk about species and speciation. But the situation is not really as troublesome as it may appear. Although real differences underlie alternative species definitions, there is really less disagreement about species concepts than the existence of so many alternative definitions seems to suggest. Each species definition has a different emphasis, but the various phenomena that they emphasize are all aspects or properties of a single kind of entity. In other words, almost all modem biologists have the same general concept of species. Differences among the many versions of this general concept are at least partly attributable to the complex and temporally extendednature of species and the process or processes through which they come into existence. In many respects, considering speciation as a temporally extended process is the key to understanding the diversity of species definitions. In this chapter, I provide a general theoretical context that accounts for both the unity and the diversity of ideas represented by alternative species definitions. First, I review the major categories of species definitions adopted by contemporary biologists. Next, I present evidence that all modem species definitions describe variants of a single general concept of species. I then discuss how the timeextended nature of species and the diversity of events that occur during the process of speciation provide the basis for the diversity of alternative species definitions. Based on a distinction between species concepts and species criteria, I propose a revised and conceptually unified terminology for the ideas described by contemporary species definitions, and I discuss the significance and limitations of different classes of species definitions. Finally, I examine an interpretation of species criteria that places alternative criteria in direct conflict and thus contains the key to resolving the species problem.

The General Lineage Concept of Species, Species Criteria, and the Process of Speciation

Principles of Animal Taxonomy By Prof. George Gaylord Simpson. (Columbia Biological Series, No. 20.) Pp. xii + 247. (New York: Columbia University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1961.) 35s. net.

/pdf/principles-of-animal-taxonomy-4gbxvwbmhr.pdf

T. C. S. Morrison-Scott

Papers

Principles of Animal Taxonomy