The Wettstein tesseract: A tool for conceptualising species‐rank decisions and illustrating speciation trajectories

Genealogy-based species-delimitation approaches resting upon multilocus sequence data aim at arranging organisms into species taxa (the “grouping” step in a classification procedure), but provide no criteria for the subsequent decision of whether these should be acknowledged as Linnaean system “ranking” step). By integration genealogical, morphological, ecological, and geographical patterns proposed by von Wettstein (1898), species-rank decisions can conceptualised reproducible manner comprehensibly depicted four-dimensional hypercube herewith introduced “Wettstein tesseract”). Additionally, tesseract provides tool illustrating teaching components properties speciation pathways realised nature.