Hi all
The Genus species concept was promoted by Linnaeus in the 1700s:

> Linnaeus attached great significance to plant sexual reproduction, which had only recently been rediscovered. Linnaeus drew some rather astonishing parallels between plant sexuality and human love; he wrote in 1729:

> The flowers' leaves. . . serve as bridal beds which the Creator has so gloriously arranged, adorned with such noble bed curtains, and perfumed with so many soft scents that the bridegroom with his bride might there celebrate their nuptials with so much the greater solemnity. . .

> The sexual basis of Linnaeus's plant classification was controversial in its day; although easy to learn and use, it clearly did not give good results in many cases. Some critics also attacked it for its sexually explicit nature: one opponent, botanist Johann Siegesbeck, called it "loathsome harlotry". (Linnaeus had his revenge, however; he named a small, useless European weed Siegesbeckia.) -- http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/linnaeus.html

Early scholars of evolution conceived a "Tree of Life" metaphor:

> Lamarck gives us the first real conception of the tree of life, or phylogeny. All classifications before his time had been simply
a numerical succession of zoological groups arranged one above another. In Lamarck's earliest attempt, published in 1802, he uses the vertical scale, which compares to a fir tree with central stem and radiating branches; but in 1809 he had arrived at the true conception of life as a tree branching from the roots into larger and smaller stems. -- Lull, Richard Swann. Organic evolution. Macmillan, 1920.

But now we now this is not the "the true conception of life" -- life is not to be viewed as a tree, but better as an interconnected web. If you tug on one part of it, the tugging will eventually reach the whole thing. It doesn't break down into discrete Genus, species, ad infinitum.

> The evolutionary web of life represents a complex environment where organisms continuously evolve for better adaptation and survival. -- Neena K. Pyzocha, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Sidi Chen, Department of Biology, MIT. 2017.

Peter L Borst

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