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jychang a day ago

Ehhhh I strongly disagree with your statement.

The biological system of taxonomy is really for the biology of the organism. We have other categories we use (as humans who are not biologists), even though we borrow organizational structure from biologists! For example, the conceptual category of "vegetable" is a culinary term, not a biological one, and is a good example of a category not used by biologists.

There's a common saying, "Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it into a fruit salad". I believe that biologists should be categorizing organisms based on their origin, but people who are not biologists should not be bound by categories created by biologists.

For example, palm trees and bamboos are not trees biologically, but actually tall grass. The biological category of "tree" may not apply, but when you hire a landscraper, you aren't using the biological category of "tree", but rather the gardening category of "tree" (when you need a palm tree cut down). That's not a failure of biology, that's just because we use 1 word "tree" to describe 2 categories used by different fields.