With racial classifications, how much lumping or splitting is optimal depends upon the task at hand. E.g., Lumping West Africans and East Africans together is often useful, but splitting them is better for predicting winners of Olympic 100m dash versus marathon. https://twitter.com/StephthePuncher/status/1011753278697136128 …
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It's absurd, specifically, because it doesn't satisfy a contiguity requirement, along the lines of, you need to be able to trace a path from any one member of a class to any other, moving only between members more closely related to each other than to anyone outside the class.
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There's probably a (fairly short) list of similarly well defined requirements which any reasonable classification system must observe. (Probably someone's written up such a list somewhere!)
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btw, if the requirement that you be in the same class as your nearest neighbor turns out to be too restrictive, you could instead use an anti-enveloping rule: if you're more closely related to two members of a class than they are to each other, you must be in the class as well.
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The meta-point being: just because there's some degrees of investigational freedom doesn't mean we can't identify hard, rigorously definable limits. That should be enough for the most skeptical observer; if you're asking for more it's an isolated demand for rigor.
End of conversation
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Optimized categorization does not equal subjectivity. Otherwise taxonomy would not exist.
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