What are species and why does it matter ? Anopheline taxonomy and the transmission of malaria

By the mid-twentieth century, taxonomy had, like many things Victorian, become unfashionable. When Washburn (1951: 298) argued for a ‘new physical anthropology’, he described the discipline’s dominant approach of that period as ‘static, with emphasis on classification based on types’, though he did qualify that characterisation as ‘oversimplified’. The change he wanted to encourage was one of emphasis, bringing genetics in without totally rejecting systematics. Even so, it must have seemed to many readers that a viewpoint centred on taxonomy would be allied, not to the new, but to the ‘old physical anthropology’ (see also Fuentes, 2010; Little and Collins, 2012).