Taxa

 Excerpted from Broadsides from the other orders:  a book of bugs by Sue Hubbell, ©1993:  

These names that we use for orders-- Lepidoptera, Coleoptera, Diptera, and all the others-- do not stand for anything in the real world…  The order names are sorting words, or taxa, that we humans use to group a dizzying array of individual bugs that otherwise we would find too many and too confusing to think about.  Because of the way we have evolved, we have sorting kinds of brains and feel more comfortable if we we put what we see in the world into various piles and categories so that we can get a handle on them.  But this says more about us and our brains that it does about the world outside our heads, and we shouldn't mix up these categories-- the taxa-- with reality.