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Classification: More Than Just Branching Patterns Of Evolution, Tod F. Stuessy

Aliso: A Journal of Systematic and Floristic Botany

The past 35 years in biological systematics have been a time of remarkable philosophical and methodological developments. For nearly a century after Darwin's Origin of Species, systematists worked to understand the diversity of nature based on evolutionary relationships. Numerous concepts were presented and elaborated upon, such as homology, parallelism, divergence, primitiveness and advancedness, cladogenesis and anagenesis. Classifications were based solidly on phylogenetic concepts; they were avowedly monophyletic. Phenetics emphasized the immense challenges represented by phylogeny reconstruction and advised against basing classifications upon it. Pheneticists forced reevaluation of all previous classificatory efforts, and objectivity and repeatability in both grouping and …