ABSTRACT
Systematics is the branch or biology that seeks to identify species and to organize them into higher taxa, such as genera, families, orders, and kingdoms. In contrast, disagreements in systematics are at a more fundamental level: Systematists disagree with each other about what the goal of classification is. By forcing one's methodology out in the open, it would be impossible to appeal to "intuition," which pheneticists felt was a dodge for defending an ill-conceived orthodoxy. They wanted to eliminate evolutionary theory from the enterprise of systematics because they believed that the introduction of theory into systematics would rob the science of its objectivity. Cladists shared with pheneticists dissatisfaction with what they thought was the subjectivity of evolutionary taxonomy. However, their goal was not to get rid of evolutionary theory in toto but to focus on the branching pattern of evolution as the one true foundation on which systematics should be constructed.
