June 2020 LSAT Section 4 Question 17

It can be inferred from the passage that Charles G. Sibley would have been most likely to agree with which one of the...

jordierose02 on July 18, 2023

Confusion on E vs C

While I do understand it isn't stated directly in C that it is a proper goal for taxonomic research, why is that not a logical deduction from the information in the passage? Sibley states" For practical reasons, we must limit the number of degrees we choose to 'recognize' by names" meaning that we should try to reduce the total number of species classifications. If we should try to do something, then why can't that be reasonably assumed to equate to being a proper goal to achieve? In addition, E discusses future developments in technology. In most cases when choosing an answer choice, we are told to ignore future predictions based on what is currently available for us to interpret. Can it be explained why this answer choice is an exception to that?

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Emil-Kunkin on July 19, 2023

I don't think we can go as far as to say that Sibley thinks we should further reduce the number of species. While he does as you pointed out note that we do have to draw the line somewhere, he doesn't tell us where that line would be. The quote you highlighted (and its context, which is important) show us that Sibley recognizes that we cannot call every difference it's own species, for practical reason. However, all this means is that we can't go to the extreme of splitting. This is far from saying that the proper goal is to actively reduce the number of species.

The same part of the passage does give some support for E, specifically the statement that the species concept is slippery because there are simply too many examples that don't fit neatly into our boxes. This shows that Sibley thought that the fundamental problem is not one of technology not being able to determine what a species is, but one of the concept of species being fundamentally flawed. So, even if we have perfect tech, we still wouldn't be able to easily draw the lines between species since the examples that fail to fit neatly will still defy east categorization.