ABSTRACT
The mission to describe life on Earth is inherently complex, and an ambition that is increasingly under pressure from the rapidly mounting threat of global species extinctions. It is therefore important to identify tools that facilitate this goal. Systematics suffers from a legacy of conflict between obsolete ideas of species, or species groups as fixed entities with fixed membership, and our modern understanding of species lineage equilibrium dynamics. It is reasonable to ask how Linnean ranked taxonomy, which was conceived not only in the eighteenth century but as a common product of human language describing the diversity of everyday species, can be usefully applied to communicate the complex patterns shaped by evolution. Systematics needs to escape the question of naming nodes in the tree and think about the original utilitarian role of ranks: taxonomic ranks are, above all, a practical tool to cope with the complexity of diversity of life.
