In Chapter 7, we saw that the characteristic features of phenetics were the production of a classification based on methods that were either based on distance data, or conflated (in cladist terms) plesiomorphic, synapomorphic, and homoplastic characters to yield distance measures. Cladistics, on the other hand, claimed to distinguish these features and was thus originally proposed as a technique for the simultaneous generation of classification and phylogeny. In the description of cladistics in the last chapter, the philosophy and methods reviewed applied to this original Hennigian “phylogenetic systematics” however, there and in the previous chapters, I have also mentioned “transformed cladistics”. This will be discussed in some detail here.

I also suggested in Chapter 7 that there was some dissatisfaction with the polarisation of characters by “out-group comparison”. Coincident with the development of transformed cladistics has been the attempt to polarise characters by ontogeny, and we shall also consider this in relation to out-group comparison. The question of parsimony will, as promised, also arise in relation to the cladists ' axiom that the natural order of organisms is an inclusive hierarchy. Further consideration of parsimony will, however, be presented in Chapter 9, where I describe the techniques of numerical cladistics.

“The transformation of cladistics”

The quotation marks enclosing the title of this section refer to the title of a paper by Platnick, “Philosophy and the Transformation of Cladistics” (1980). A general awareness of change in the background philosophy of cladistics began in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but its roots lie in Hennig's original system. We have already seen elsewhere (Chapter 7, Section III), that Hennig was not wedded to the dogma of dichotomous speciation.