Indeed the basic concepts of cladistics were formulated long before they came to be called cladistics. Phenetics took a statistical approach to the construction of classifications and is based on overall resemblance. Pheneticists reasoned that if enough characters were analyzed and a general measure of overall similarity were used, the resulting classification would, in the end, resemble the evolutionary history of the group simply because any problems would be swamped by the overwhelming mass of the data. This, unfortunately, did not turn out to be the case and phenetics is rarely used today in constructing classifications or phylogenetic reconstruction. However the computational procedures developed have had a tremendous influence on the techniques used by cladists is deriving their classifications.
Cladistics is the dominant form of classification methodology and phylogeny analysis used today.
It represents a combination of a set of formal underlying principles and computational techniques. To learn about some of the computational methodologies, please refer to the links listed on the systematics page. The underlying principles of cladistics are outlined below. A Few Underlying Principles of Phylogenetic Systematics Phylogenetic systematics holds the view that classifications must represent the underlying phylogeny of the species and higher categories. To achieve this goal cladistics has formalized the following principles.