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Comment by Myrmornis | Hacker News Reader

Thanks, I've looked at that before, but I don't think I've ever read it properly. Are you sure it's not missing the simple answer? Give up the idea that the question of whether populations are "conspecific" should be assigned a meaning.

Words are just labels we attach to concepts that we find ourselves wanting to refer to. My claim is that there is no concept in allopatry that's worth naming.

Have a look at Hey's underappreciated book (he's the first author cited in the article you linked).

It is an embarrassment: because there's a simple answer (the one I just gave), and because the confusion over "species concepts" has persisted for decades and confused generations of biologists, and hundreds, if not thousands of flawed papers have been published claiming "sufficient divergence" of allopatric populations.

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Trying to summarize a big comment into a small one here:

I think it’s more of a deeper problem with language and reality more generally. To me it seems like species is a noun, like other nouns, but reality is ultimately a process. What is needed is a “verb-based” language for describing reality.

A lot of “process philosophers” like Whitehead, Deleuze, etc. have argued similar things.

So yeah I suppose I agree it’s ultimately a taxonomy problem, but in order to fix that I think you essentially need to reinvent language entirely. So it’s not a quick fix for biologists, it’s a systemic issue that I’m not sure really has a solution from within science itself.

I know this sort of doesn’t engage directly with your comment, but process philosophy is a personal interest and I wanted to link to the SEP, heh.

I’ll check out those books though, thanks.

Thanks, your noun/process suggestion is interesting. Perhaps that is indeed a good way of characterizing what happened in biology. It's clear that biology has stumbled into a linguistic/philosophical trap; if it were actually science they wouldn't have been "working on it" since Darwin! I'll try to find time to look at the philosophy you refer to.

Do you know of comparable "messes" like the one in biology that you suspect were caused by a lack of more process-based language?

Are there some human languages that are more process-based than English?

It makes me wonder whether what the LLMs have captured in their training data might be effective for looking over different languages to see if there are any interesting different ways of handling "species".

I think it's probably just a problem with every field. Specifically though, at least for my interests, is traditional theology: God being omnipotent, eternal, etc. causes a lot of philosophical problems, which is what Process Theology aims to address. A lot of this goes back to Plato's idea of forms, which are essentially eternal, unchanging concepts.

I can't seem to find much on the idea that certain languages are more suited to this than others. Theoretically a verb-oriented language would be better.

To me it seems like a giant philosophical project: to create a language that is process-first. It might simply be beyond the capability of humans to actually use such a language in the world, though: which is where AI might be interesting, as it doesn't have the kinds of cognitive limitations on delineations like humans do.

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