[Speciation and its mechanisms: conceptual background and recent advances].

This paper presents a historical approach on general concepts of speciation and its mechanisms, from the primordial ideas to the most recent theories that seek to elucidate the origin of biodiversity. It is common knowledge that speciation is a controversial and complex issue that encompasses virtually all the lines of research of biology, in addition to geology and paleontology. The main objective of the paper is to clarify the theoretical concepts on the origin of the animal species, in the chronological order in which they became established throughout the whole of the development of evolutionary biology as a science.