this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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I would wager you have more of an idea of what a state of matter is than biologists do of what a species is. Humans like to put things into neat boxes but nature is under no deal obligation to cooperate.
I'd actually argue the opposite. With states of matter, we're attempting to delineate how reality groups together sets of related properties that vary between conditions in similar ways for different substances.
Looking for the edges that nature drew.
With species though, we drew the lines. We drew them with a mind towards ensuring it's objectively measurable but it's still not a natural delineation. Taxonomists (biologists are actually a different field) mostly run into uncertainty with debating which categorization property takes precedence, and what observations of species have actually been made.
So while they debate which system to use, the particulars of the systems are pretty concrete.
States of matter and species are both cases where we drew the lines based on what we thought was obvious. Then we ran into cases that were not so obvious anymore and challenged how we define these lines.