This article is interesting, but also extremely meandering. Here are the two paragraphs that address the title of the article.<p>> As language-bound human beings, struggling to understand life’s complexities, we still require the semantic construct of agreed-upon labels. A team of biologists, Francine Pleijel and George Rouse, have proposed the LITU, or “least-inclusive taxonomic unit,” to replace the concept of species entirely. These would be provisional identities, which they describe as “statements about the current state of knowledge (or lack thereof )”—snapshots rather than static points, documented under the assumption that they might change as more genetic information becomes available.<p>> This would move us away from lectotypes, allotypes, and other type specimens, a shift Pleijel and Rouse strongly advocate. According to them, “making taxonomists decide that a few dead specimens represent a species is an extravagant extrapolation that has no place in science.” Scientists are “forced by the existing codes of nomenclature to describe organisms as species when in fact they generally have no idea of what is going on in nature.”