Speaking as a scientist, best practice is to provide the working definition for critical terms. It would be unwise to assume that any biological definition is universal, static, comprehensive, and known to the audience. Putting the onus on the writer to disambiguate their terms also alleviates the requirement to achieve a uniform definition. Scientific categories are basically statistical in nature. All models are wrong, some are useful.
My understanding is that in legal world, there is a different mechanism for dealing with ambiguity: we empower a judge to interpret the law. Laws, in turn, are written with the understanding that they will be interpreted by judges, enforced by police, and modified by politicians elected by voters.
Your argument implies we should use political discomfort to decide which biostatistical model the term “species” refers to, then require that judges use that model when interpreting the law. I would never accept this as a scientist, I would not want judges to adopt this heuristic, and the argument basically reads to me like a bit of motivated linguistic political theater.
Speaking as a scientist, best practice is to provide the working definition for critical terms. It would be unwise to assume that any biological definition is universal, static, comprehensive, and known to the audience. Putting the onus on the writer to disambiguate their terms also alleviates the requirement to achieve a uniform definition. Scientific categories are basically statistical in nature. All models are wrong, some are useful.
My understanding is that in legal world, there is a different mechanism for dealing with ambiguity: we empower a judge to interpret the law. Laws, in turn, are written with the understanding that they will be interpreted by judges, enforced by police, and modified by politicians elected by voters.
Your argument implies we should use political discomfort to decide which biostatistical model the term “species” refers to, then require that judges use that model when interpreting the law. I would never accept this as a scientist, I would not want judges to adopt this heuristic, and the argument basically reads to me like a bit of motivated linguistic political theater.