 One natural way to understand these debates is to recognize them as systematists sorting out “reconstructing a phylogeny” and “classifying a group of taxa” as two distinct tasks, and working out how (if at all) these tasks ought to be reciprocally informative (Mayr 1965a, 1974; Griffiths 1974; Hennig 1975; de Queiroz &amp; Gauthier 1990, 1992). With respect to this particular issue, cladistics has largely won; today when scientists designate higher taxa they are typically always describing monophyletic groups. The principle of monophyly has proven to be such a powerful explanatory and organizing tool that the commitment to it has grown widely and now dominates systematics–in addition to informing both theory and methodology across fields of biology This is one reason why this period is sometimes referred to as “The Cladistic Revolution” (Hull 1988; Kearney 2007; Haber 2009).