Academia doesn’t value negative results (‘we spent years and tons of money on this, but it looks like there’s only one species’ or ‘we found another few homo erectus bone fragments’) as high as positive ones (‘a new species of great ape’ or ‘the first evidence for a missing link’)

There likely also is bias in what appears in the press. That will affect a layman’s perception of the distribution between Lumpers and Splitters.

(For human languages, governments often push towards splitting. “A language is a dialect with an army”)