 Yet, early phylogeneticists certainly saw metaphysical implications of their views, and this impacted how they approach the problem of reconstructing phylogeny. Simply put, if you think that taxa are historical entities, and that the aim of phylogeny is the reconstruction of their histories, the task is very different than if you take the aim to be to find ahistorical similarities or shared essential characters (Hull 1970; Griffiths 1974). Though given the ubiquitous adoption of the phylogenetic project (in a broad sense), debates over how metaphysics ought to impact inferential methods continues in some areas of phylogenetics.