>>Personally I think phenetics has its uses, its a good tool for testing and developing field keys. Thats a good use and necessary and worthwhile. I am not going to develop trees with it though as its incapable of recognising homoplasy.

I agree that phenetic approaches have a lot of uses, particularly at very low taxonomic levels, to visualise subtle patterns of variation and identify morphologically discrete clusters. In this context, I tend tho think of phenetics as making the bricks that phylogenetics uses to build a house.

Cheers,

Wolfgang
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