We have seen in Chapter 6 and the previous chapters that dissatisfaction with traditional taxonomy gave rise, after the Second World War, to two distinct attempts at a remedy – phenetics and cladistics. In this chapter, I review the methodology of these two schools, as they were originally proposed and developed. In each case I describe the principles and methods, which I hope will be sufficiently clear to non-taxonomic readers to enable them to follow the subsequent discussion. In each case there has been an important development of the original philosophy and method. In the case of phenetics, various biochemical techniques have used phenetic methods, but also, and importantly, “numerical cladistics” has diverged from phenetics and converged on cladistics. In the case of cladistics, “transformed cladistics” is regarded by some as an offshoot and rival to mainstream cladistics and by others as a logical development of the mainstream. These will be dealt with in Chapters 8 and 9. In Chapter 10, I shall attempt to sum up the present state of taxonomy and to draw conclusions that I regard as pivotal to the theme of this book.

Phenetics

Pheneticists used to trace their history back to Adanson, a contemporary of Linnaeus (Sokal and Sneath 1963, p. 50).