Recent and ongoing debates in biology and in the philosophy of biology reveal widespread dissatisfaction with the current definitions or circumscriptions, which are often vague or controversial, of key concepts such as the gene, individual, species, and homology, and even of whole disciplinary fields within the life sciences. To some extent, the long growing awareness of these conceptual issues and the contrasting views defended in their regard can be construed as a symptom of the need to revisit traditional unchallenged partitions between the specialist disciplines within the life sciences. I argue here that the current relationships between anchor disciplines (e.g., developmental biology, evolutionary biology, biology of reproduction) and nomadic concepts wandering between them is worth being explored from a reciprocal perspective, by selecting suitable anchor concepts around which disciplinary fields can flexibly move. Three examples are offered, focusing on generalized anchor concepts of generation (redefined in a way that suggests new perspectives on development and reproduction), organizational module (with a wide-ranging domain of application in comparative morphology, developmental biology, and evolutionary biology) and species as unit of representation of biological diversity (suggesting a taxonomic pluralism that must be managed with suitable adjustments of current nomenclature rules).

中文翻译：

---

生命科学学科领域：不断发展的鸿沟和锚点概念

关于生物学和生物学哲学的最近和正在进行的辩论表明，人们对当前的定义或限制不满意，这些定义或限制通常对基因，个体，物种和同源性等关键概念甚至整个学科领域都含糊不清或有争议。在生命科学中。在某种程度上，人们对这些概念性问题的认识日渐增长，并就其主张辩护的相反观点，可以解释为需要重新审视生命科学专业学科之间传统的，不受挑战的划分的一种征兆。我在这里辩称，锚定学科（例如，发展生物学，进化生物学，生殖生物学）与游牧概念之间徘徊的当前关系值得从相互的角度进行探讨，通过选择合适的锚点概念，学科领域可以灵活地移动。提供了三个示例，重点放在广义的生成代锚概念（以对发育和繁殖的新观点进行重新定义），组织模块（在比较形态学，发育生物学和进化生物学中的广泛应用领域）和物种作为生物多样性代表的单位（建议分类学多元化，必须对当前的命名规则进行适当的调整来加以管理）。