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Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

I figured that there is something below the rank of species that differentiates them then, but checking what the word for that would be, there is none! Species is the most specific classification of life forms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomic_rank), so then they should be literally the same animal (every caribou is a reindeer and vice versa). Checking Wikipedia:

> "Reindeer is the European name for the species of Rangifer, while in North America, Rangifer species are known as Caribou." The word reindeer is an anglicized version of the Old Norse words hreinn (“reindeer”) and dýr (“animal”) and has nothing to do with reins. The word caribou comes through French, from the Mi'kmaq qalipu, meaning "snow shoveler", and refers to its habit of pawing through the snow for food.

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Subspecies is taxonomic category below species that isn’t in the standard ranking.

Reindeer have a bunch of subspecies. And there is argument if there are one species or six. Caribou are American and reindeer are Eurasian.

Santa Claus calls them reindeer, therefore Santa must be Eurasian. Everyone in Finland knows that he lives in Finland. Canadians, however...

> I figured that there is something below the rank of species that differentiates them then, but checking what the word for that would be, there is none! Species is the most specific classification of life forms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomic_rank), so then they should be literally the same animal (every caribou is a reindeer and vice versa).

What? That's like saying that cauliflower and cabbage must be literally the same plant.

Reindeer and caribou are differentiated by which continent you find them on. To the extent that it's difficult to walk from Canada to Norway or Siberia, they will have associated genetic differences.

opens Wikipedia on cauliflour

> Cauliflower is one of several vegetables in the species Brassica oleracea

clicks on the latter

> Brassica oleracea is a plant species from family Brassicaceae that includes many common cultivars used as vegetables, such as cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, Savoy cabbage, kohlrabi, and gai lan.

I'm sorry, what?! All the same species? What's the point of calling something a species if it's a different plant or animal! That's like grouping cats and dogs as the same species called Quadlegs Adorables

More seriously, goes to show how little I know about this. Thanks for pointing out how silly a thing it was for me to be surprised that there are different words for the same animal .. when it's not actually the same animal/plant necessarily! I did not know this was a thing. I did hear about definition problems and proposals of "when it can produce viable offspring" or something, but they didn't say that cabbage and cauliflower produces viable offspring which would 180° change my idea on whether that's a useful lowest taxonomy class.

> it's difficult to walk from Canada to Norway or Siberia, they will have associated genetic differences.

I was surprised about that indeed, but less so now that I know that "one species" != "scientific way of saying 'one animal/plant/thingy'"

> What's the point of calling something a species if it's a different plant or animal! That's like grouping cats and dogs as the same species called Quadlegs Adorables

There is a lot of essentialism that went into initial efforts at taxonomy and a lot that people believe instinctively that they bring to their own modern understanding of it.

By now it is agreed that the correct use of taxonomy is to classify organisms in groups according to common descent from earlier organisms. This was not true as recently as the 1980s, when my mother's college biology textbook included a "teach the controversy" section explaining that that was one approach to taxonomy, but there were other approaches that also made very good points. [Editorial note: there were other approaches, but of course it isn't true that they made good points. They made points like "it's important for each taxon at a given level to contain the same number of species as the other taxa at that level".]

Anyway, once you lose the essentialism, you discover that there is no way to determine what label ["kingdom" / "class" / "genus"...] should be given to a taxon. [= a group of organisms sharing common descent from an ancestral organism.] So you see that divisions between taxa that are important, but that don't match up to traditional boundaries, are given names like subspecies, subfamily, and infraorder.

You might consider why you think it's absurd to unite the categories of "cats" and "dogs", but you see no problem uniting "dachshunds" [tiny and oblong, aggressive, like entering burrows to hunt] with "newfoundlands" [huge, affectionate, like rescuing humans from water]. Just the size differences are such that a female dachshund is unlikely to be able to breed with a male newfoundland. But also consider that rescuing drowning humans is such an important part of the newfoundland lifestyle that they have webbed feet.

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