Dear Log,
«There's an interesting question to be asked about why people persist in assuming that the world is generally linnaean -- why mostly-hierarchical ontologies are so stubbornly popular -- in the face of several thousand years of small successes and large failures. I have a theory about this, which this post is too short to contain :-) ... It has to do with evolutionary psychology and the advantage of linnaean ontologies for natural kinds -- that's for another post.»--Marc Liberman, in a larger interesting article
