The name of a species is fixed to a specific "holotype". Oetzi is the only neanderthal; archeopterix had different names for each of the first specimen found; C

The name of a species is fixed to a specific "holotype". Oetzi is the only neanderthal; archeopterix had different names for each of the first specimen found; Carl von Linee is the holotype for Homo Sapiens Sapiens, according to some taxonomists, at least (himself, I guess) ... Exactly because this is a known problem. A single individual is as discrete as it gets. In linguistics this problem is called the single other hypothesis and rater popular. In programming and math it's the diamond square problem, e.g. for java's inheritance mechanism, which is countered with generics, traits, typeclasses and so on. Abstract Algebra and Category theory have to deal with this and the corollary from my POV is, that it's just really complicated. Before genetics, phenotype was based on appearance. Genetic genealogy is a rather young field, so it might take a while for deeper insights to trickle down. Also, it's not completely wrong to base a classification on environment, because a protein to synthesis X from Y is useless, if the environment doesn't provide Y.