 In the 1990s experimental phylogeneticists used empirical and simulation studies to more rigorously empirically test claims of performance of competing phylogenetic methods. This included testing competing methods to reconstruct known in-vivo phylogenies (of bacteriophage) that were carefully constructed, tracked, and archived over many generations and more complex simulated phylogenies (taking advantage of the ever-growing processing power available on the lab bench) (Hillis, Bull, White, Badgett, &amp; Molineux 1992; Hillis &amp; Bull 1993; Hillis, Huelsenbeck, &amp; Cunningham 1994). These largely confirmed that distance and parsimony methods were subject to long-branch attraction, where model-based statistical methods such as likelihood avoided these epistemic traps.