In this specific case it also has practical implications. What is worth preserving and organising (data implies metadata to be useful), what, when analysed, constitutes a legitimate scientific advancement (e.g., worth sending to peer review, or posting as preprint)? Etc.

I don't agree that it's pointless. A question doesn't need to be operationally useful to my work to be of interest to me. I find it interesting to question our fundamental assumptions, sometimes that implies interacting with statisticians, sometimes with philosophers, sometimes other specialists.

Many studies have found that w/in-species dN/dS decays w/ the genetic distance between strains, which is often attributed to natural selection. Here Zhiru shows that a large portion of this trend can be quantitatively explained by the accumulation of horizontally transferred DNA segments over time.