Cladistics and Higgs particle-ism are simply just annoying conceptual conflations of "object" and "class"

Things like "the true tree of life" of cladistics and "the Higgs particle" of particle physics are logical end paradoxes of conflation of "object" with "class", ie, actually assuming that classes are real instead of objects, as in the cases of the class "species" of cladistics and all classes of "elementary particles" of particle physics, which also Bertrand Russell demonstrated in 1901 with his "Russell's paradox". The simple reason for this fate of such conflations is that classification is orthogonal and therefore leads to paradox in logical reasoning if we conflate the direction of the orthogonality of classification.

Exactly how it leads to paradox is, however, more difficult to explain, because it only concerns conceptualization and logic themselves, not the reality they refer to, that is, the relation between the concepts "objects" (or "particles") and "classes" together with the relation between "premises" and "deductions" of logic, and thus is confusing.

The fundamental problem is that whereas few of us would ever conflate "premises" with "deduction", many of us have a tendency to conflate "objects" with "class" (notice that the former in these two pairs is in plural whereas the latter is in singular), although the relation between the former of the pairs to the latter of the pairs is the same in both pairs: a deduction can't exist without presumed premises just as a class can't exist without presumed objects. This problem (ie, that many of us have a tendency to conflate "objects" with "class") thus means that those (many of us) start their logical reasoning from assumed classes instead of from assumed objects, meaning that they get the relation between the two pairs "objects and class" and "premises and deduction" as orthogonal, meaning that they actually conflate "plural" with "singular" by conflating "class" with ""premises" and "objects" with "deduction". This conflation leads to some kind of Russell's paradox because a single single object thereby is "a half" deduction. Such "a half" deduction (ie, Russell's paradox) are thus both "the true tree of life" of cladistics and "the Higgs particle" of particle physics. Typical for such figments of the imagination is that they are singular, ie, "THE true tree of life" and "THE Higgs particle", in difference from, for example, "species", "leptones" and "bosons". As "half deductions" they are paradoxically contradictory between pattern and process, as the Barber in Barbers paradox.

Belief in such paradoxes is either devastating or irrelevant. It is devastating if it induces a practical search for the paradox, because a paradox can't, of course, be found, and irrelevant if it claims to have found the paradox (like particle physics). It is simply just an annoying conceptual conflation in science.