I’ve always found useful the idea of people temperamentally being either “lumpers” and “splitters”. Lumpers are those who assign things broadly and generally, valuing similarities over differences, and splitters are those who assign things narrowly and precisely, valuing differences over similarities. XKCD described the distinction well.
This fascinating essay by Richard Smyth is about the very real consequences of lumping and splitting in the world of conservation, and about how our decision whether or not to assign an animal its own taxonomic category can have transformative consequences for its chances of survival:
“Similarly, a segment in the BBC’s recent wildlife series Asia highlighted the grave plight of the Gobi bear. There are, Sir David Attenborough told us, fewer than 40 Gobi bears left. It’s a miserable statistic. But it’s worth thinking about exactly what’s being said here. The Gobi bear is, as it happens, a subspecies, a significant sub-population of the brown bear Ursus arctos. But what if it wasn’t? ‘There are 40 Gobi bears left’ lands a little differently than ‘There are 40 brown bears left in this part of the Gobi desert’; the former sounds like a call to action, no time to lose! – whereas the latter is more, well, who cares? What’s a few brown bears, here or there?
“What this boils down to, again, is the question of what’s real – what’s significant, what means something.”
