>>11188903>ok then where does this talk of phylogenetics overriding physical morphology come from or is my prof just salty?You’ve confused cladistic taxonomy with classification of living organisms into species. Cladistic taxonomy is concerned *only* with common ancestry and generally operates with respect to larger timescales, and genetic analysis is obviously the most useful tool for determining the relationship of living species to other species and extinct ones. Genetic analysis did cause a lot of restructuring of clades because it showed a more accurate picture of relationships than mere morphology, which can often be misleading.
But species are a bit different, and can be classified through non-cladistic ways, and it’s actually the case that most species are non-cladistic constructions, and this may be for the best because species can and do interbreed. For example, the ecological species concept defines species based on their ecological niche, which would make polar bears and brown bears different species. If you defined the species cladistically, they’d be the same species because brown bear family trees can go into polar bear ones and vice versa, and they’d be the same species in the biological species concept because they can make viable offspring in the first place. On the small scale of species, non-cladistic classifications May simply be more useful to us, but cladistics of course dominates on the larger scales of genuses, families, etc.
