On the history of biological systematics

Biological systematics started off with the ancient Greek Parmenides claiming that reality is frozen. All change we percieve only occur in our own minds. Classes are thus nailed once and for all. All single objects are born into their respective class without possibility to escape it. An elephant is an elephant and a printer is a printer from the beginning and forever. This approach is called "realism".

Biological systematics continued with Heracleitos claiming that it is the other way around, that is, that reality is continously changing. That a single entity just appears to be the same over time like the flame on a candle appears to be the same, although it is continously changing. This approach is called "nominalism".

Aristotle united these two orthogonal (i.e., diametrically opposed) approaches into a system of specifics, generics and specific differences. The system united the contradiction of realism with the relativism of nominalism into a conceptual tool that can be used consistently to discuss reality. He thus invented the notion of a genus with its species. The problem that remained was how to combine genera consistently into something else.

This problem was solved by Linné by his orthogonal classificatory system uniting classes hierarchically by intervening categories (like species, genera, families, classes, etcetera).

When Linné had solved this problem, it took about 300 years until a biological systematist (i.e., the German entomologist Willi Hennig) found the way back through these conceptual developments again raising Parmenides´claim that reality is frozen and thus that classes are nailed once and for all. Hennig thus confused everything to the degree that it is difficult to get out of the confusion. The question is what the question is for Hennig's answer. Clear is, however, that Hennig's answer is wrong, independently of what the question is, because it is contradictory, just as contradictory as it was about 2,500 years ago.

Biological systematics thus appears to rotate in an eternal orthogonal carousel searching for a reality that fits its classification. Biological systematists do not appear to be interested in understanding of reality, but just in an unambiguous classification of it that can't be reached. The question is if biological systematics will ever acknowledge the fact that it can't be unambiguous (per definition).