 Sukumaran and Knowles (2017) provide a good example of the discussions over what kinds of inferences are licensed by the multispecies coalescent, and the way that metaphysical concerns overlap with epistemological ones. They focus on what kinds of inferences may be drawn from multispecies coalescent methods, arguing that it is a mistake to simply treat the units identified by these methods as species, when they may turn out to be population-level structures instead (i.e., populations of a species, rather than distinct species). They seek to highlight that mistaking population structures for species (or too quickly drawing the inference of the latter from the former, without further evidence), can undermine precisely the sorts of inferences that phylogenetics seeks to license by artificially and unjustifiably inflating species counts: