A free-thinking biologist certainly _could_ choose to reject the orthodoxy of grouping living things by ancestry and reproductive isolation and instead choose to study living things that are yellow, but their treatises would probably be difficult to follow, because "living things that are yellow" is intrinsically a much less cohesive subject matter than, say, "birds": experience with black crows is probably going to be _more_ useful when studying yellow canaries than experience with yellow daffodils—even if, _in all philosophical strictness_, there are a million things that these categories could have been drawn around, and who can say but that some hypothetical other culture might have chosen color rather than ancestry as the true determinant of "species"?
A free-thinking biologist certainly _could_ choose to reject the orthodoxy of grouping living things by ancestry and reproductive isolation and instead choose to study living things that are yellow, but their treatises would probably be difficult to follow, because "living things that are yellow" is intrinsically a much less cohesive subject matter than, say, "birds": experience with black crows is probably going to be _more_ useful when studying yellow canaries than experience with yellow daffodils—even if, _in all philosophical strictness_, there are a million things that these categories could have been drawn around, and who can say but that some hypothetical other culture might have chosen color rather than ancestry as the true determinant of "species"?