Nonetheless, most people haven't the foggiest idea of the underlying causal mechanisms that are actually responsible for the tiger's legs, roar, stripes, and fur. All humans classify animals and plants into folk species. These species are useful for understanding local situations, and making local predictions. But from a scientific vantage, the concept of folk species is woefuly inadequate for capturing the graded relationships that characterize the evolution of species over geologically vast dimensions of time and space. Folk Taxonomy Folk species are fit into a hierarchy.
Many different cultures exhibit a number of special purpose hieararchies.
Taxa are mutually exclusive. Terminal contrast occurs between those named groupoings which include no additional named groupings. There is little systematic relation between terminal folk taxa and scientific taxa. Better move is to base comparison on notion of rank, but this is much more difficult to do. Ranking is a cognitive mapping that places living-kind categories in a structure of absolute levels, which may be evolutionarily designed to correspond to fundamentally different levesl of reality.