There's always been a push and pull between the splitters and the lumpers. Discovering a new species can seem more exciting than finding another member of an ex

There's always been a push and pull between the splitters and the lumpers. Discovering a new species can seem more exciting than finding another member of an existing study. But the concept of a species (genera, etc.) is very slippery anyway; sometimes its said that inability to breed viable offspring is a necessary condition, but we have examples of that happening ... without subsequent revision of the taxonomy. Life (and the physical world), slips past the edges of our ontologies all the time (one reason that I laugh when people justify the object model in programming in terms of them somehow mapping onto real world objects.