When I call a fern (or wolf, crab, crow, whale, shark), at that level of syntactical broadly used common word I’m mostly talking about the phenotype, not the genotype. If someone was saying something about a specific fern, then we can argue against those romantic idea of deep time, a little. I mean, we’re probably all descendants of some ancient panspermia event anyway if you want to feel some connection to the ancient forgotten past.

Yes. I’m assuming your just some dude and not a telecom with teams of lawyers.