Species in the Age of Discordance: Meeting Report and Introduction

In 2017, three interdisciplinary workshops were held on whether and how biological discordance might impact our views on species. Though the prompting focus of these workshops was genealogical discordance, the precise sense of ‘discordance’ was left intentionally ambiguous. This was to encourage an examination of the question from many different perspectives and to foster connections across disciplines. Participants included philosophers, historians, and other social scientists, alongside a range of biologists representing microbiology, population genetics, phylogenetics, invasion biology, herpetology, and ecology, among other areas. Here, context is provided for those workshops and to help motivate why biological discordance generates useful interdisciplinary research problems, along with brief summaries of the workshop papers included in this special issue