Intuition and vernacular make poor guides to the formal lexicon of taxonomy, as I learned over the course of trying to answer the question "okay, so what kind o

Intuition and vernacular make poor guides to the formal lexicon of taxonomy, as I learned over the course of trying to answer the question "okay, so what kind of wasp am I looking at right now, anyway?" Two years, a couple shelf-feet of research material, and a great deal of dedicated study later - "dedicated" here meaning for example that I taught myself how to bind books because they're better for annotation and reference than PDFs - I find myself more or less able to give a fairly confident answer to that question in about two-thirds of cases, and even at that I'm often not very sure. And that's all just been to develop an experienced birder's sense of where a given animal fits into the broader picture! It'd be a lot more complicated if I were more than just a casual amateur. Phylogenetically, it's likewise reasonable to say that there's no such thing as a wasp, as the category is paraphyletic in "all of Apocrita that isn't ants and bees". This doesn't render "wasp" meaningless in its vernacular sense, of course - I may know I just saw a female Auplopus architectus metallicus [1], but if you ask about her, I'll spare you the detail and just say she's a spider wasp whose babies are lucky to have a mom who's busy seeing they'll grow up big and strong like her. The point of the article isn't to discuss the vernacular, and the point of "there's no such thing as a tree" is to make a startlingly counterintuitive assertion that draws the reader into a detailed discussion of how genomic taxonomy works. Such statements constitute a fairly common rhetorical technique - one worth knowing about, so as not perhaps again to miss the forest for a single tree. [1] https://aaron-m.com/2021/01/23/auplopus-architectus-metallicus https://aaron-m.com/2021/01/23/auplopus-architectus-metallic...