 The conceptual and epistemological impacts of discordance on phylogenetic inference come together in recent debates over Sukumaran and Knowles’ (2017) work and commentary on the multispecies coalescent (Rannala &amp; Yang 2003; Yang &amp; Rannala 2010). Very roughly, the multispecies coalescent extends the principle of the coalescent from population genetics to phylogenetics. In population genetics, a gene can be sampled from multiple individuals in a single population; coalescent theory provides a way to model the ancestral history of that gene to a common ancestor, i.e., where that history coalesces. The multispecies coalescent does something similar, but with samples from multiple populations (or even species). These and other techniques were developed in response to the challenge posed by Maddison (1997) to develop methods that recognize speciation as an extended process. Roughly, the lineages of genes, individual organisms, populations, and species within a taxa can all “come apart”, or have different phylogenetic histories, and display “a fractal hierarchy of divergences” (Sukumaran &amp; Knowles 2017: 1607). Multispecies coalescent techniques help reveal the fine-grained structure of complex multi-level lineages (Haber 2012), which has generated discussion on how these internal lineage structures relate to species delimitation and other phylogenetic inferences (e.g., de Queiroz 2007; Knowles &amp; Carstens 2007; Haber 2012; Carstens, Pelletier, Reid, &amp; Satler 2013; Hahn &amp; Nakhleh 2016; Mallet et al. 2016; Velasco 2019).