[Taxacom] Source of quote on taxon ranking

[Fred Schueler]

Quoting Mark Schildhauer <schild at nceas.ucsb.edu>:

> Googling indicates source as "The History of Biological Theories" by
> Emanuel Radl (1930).  Radl contrasts Darwin and his followers with
> Leibniz' essentialism--
>
> It was just this idea that Darwin and his followers combated in
> using the same words. They asserted that between
> isolated phenomena there are only unessential differences ;
> in Nature things merge by insensible gradations one into
> the other, just as, for instance, the hamlet becomes the
> village, the village the little town, the large town, the city.
> The distinction between these terms is merely a matter
> of arithmetic, or of an arbitrary scale in the minds of those
> who use them

* so that incorporation of these settlement entities, when it occurs,  
is analogous to the evolution of reproductive isolation.

fred (resident of what's formally a hamlet)
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