Heed the father of cladistics

摘要

In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin proclaimed that "our classifications will come to be, as far as they can be so made, genealogies". That turned out to be easier said than done. Even as late as the 1970s, biologists were still grouping animals and plants largely on the basis of overall physical similarity and whether they possessed or lacked certain traits, such as a backbone or the ability to produce flowers.