 Parsimony can be defended without falsificationism, and other justifications have been offered that appeal to the method’s namesake, i.e., the principle of parsimonious reasoning or appeals to Ockham’s Razor (e.g., Kluge 2005). It amounts to (i) defending parsimony (the principle) as the criterion by which we ought to assess competing phylogenetic hypotheses, and (ii) arguing that parsimony (the method) is the best mode for achieving that goal by seeking out that tree that minimizes the number of evolutionary novelties required to explain the distribution of characters. This may also be presented as identifying that tree that minimizes the number of ad hoc assumptions of homoplasy. Though this appeal to simplicity may be wedded to falsificationist justifications (as we saw above), they are logically independent defenses. There is certainly an intuitive appeal to the principle of parsimony in the sciences, and Ockham’s razor remains influential for good reason. But justifying parsimony methods by appeal to simplicity is not so straight-forward. Evaluating which phylogenetic approaches are justified by Ockham’s Razor depends on what is being counted (Haber 2009). Sober (1988b, 2015 among others) provide useful discussions of the role of simplicity and the principle of parsimony in phylogenetics.