 The pheneticists disputed that we were in a position to know common ancestry with enough certainty to justify adopting it as foundational to our notion of “relatedness”, and maintained that the taxonomists’ job was discovering clusters of similarity (Sokal &amp; Sneath 1963). Pheneticists were critical of what they viewed as the entrenched approach to systematics, arguing that the traditional approach to selecting between hypotheses largely relied on the relative prominence or status of the biologist rather than good scientific methodology. They explicitly framed their views in the context of arguments about what constituted “good science” and sought to promote independent and objective modes of assessing competing taxonomic groupings that relied on transparent and repeatable methods. This included advocating for a greater separation between biological theory and the construction of similarity groups.