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So what? A car, a bike, and a truck can all be called subsets of vehicles, but we still have (and need) different words for each type.


Primates, canids, felids, and ungulates are all subsets of mammals and all have further subsets. Mammalia is further a subset of animalia. When we’re discussing categorizations, it’s often helpful to have multiple levels of categories. I’m not sure why you seem to be calling out specificity as a gotcha, when my argument isn’t at all that we don’t need multiple terms. It’s that we should consider these things in terms of similarity and specific differences, not throw away a term as useless as the article and its headline suggest.




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