Biology is unique; no other classical study, in modern practice, (can) contain both the sheer magnitude of complexity and the propensity to sweep away that same complexity with just a mere (if only temporary) classification.
This may be a result of academic laziness - the question begs, especially when the answer is known. But showing your work is tedious in some fields, and impossible in others. The questions posed in biology must be formulated to be answerable a-priori with evidence that often appears to be biased towards confirmation outside of the domains of specialized experts.
It's hard to inspire wonder in the juxtapositional environment where any discovery will, at minimum, produce a magnitude more questions - all to be relegated to labels until another wave of motivation and technological processes facilitate another plateau of progress to be confronted.
Biology is hard. It's like reverse engineering, from scratch, the watch you found on the beach; 50 years and 50 miles away from the watch factory.
It’s much, much harder than that! The watch was at least designed by a human, with parts that have at most a few simultaneous functions. All the parts are big enough to see, and made of metal so constant shape-shifting isn’t part of their functionality. It was mostly designed to be understandable. Biology is just a giant soup of whatever works. Any organizing principles are accidental or only exist in the eye of the beholder.
Finding some temporary unifying mechanism or principle to organize understanding with is the only way to make progress, but the history of biology is packed with ideas that eventually hardened into dogma and blocked progress until somebody managed to blow them up.
>Biology is just a giant soup of whatever works. Any organizing principles are accidental or only exist in the eye of the beholder.
Evolution is the difficult-to-understand answer to this; we tend to anthropomorphically and erroneously assign intent and purpose in a chicken/egg and begging-the-question way.
Life continues until it doesn't; to assign any more gravitas to our collection of localized complexity is the same awe that a plebeian holds when presented with a meatball-and-spaghetti-on-a-wall painting of modern art; ignorant to them that it was all that remained after a rather particularly sticky food fight.
This may be a result of academic laziness - the question begs, especially when the answer is known. But showing your work is tedious in some fields, and impossible in others. The questions posed in biology must be formulated to be answerable a-priori with evidence that often appears to be biased towards confirmation outside of the domains of specialized experts.
It's hard to inspire wonder in the juxtapositional environment where any discovery will, at minimum, produce a magnitude more questions - all to be relegated to labels until another wave of motivation and technological processes facilitate another plateau of progress to be confronted.
Biology is hard. It's like reverse engineering, from scratch, the watch you found on the beach; 50 years and 50 miles away from the watch factory.