 As an important aside, we say ‘largely’ in the previous paragraph because—as in many cases in biology—there is not unanimity. Notably, biologists that identify as pattern cladists would dispute many of the chacterizations we have offered about phylogenetics, including the very first sentence of this entry, i.e., “a phylogeny is a reconstruction of evolutionary history.” Though there are a number of views that might be identified with pattern cladism, all would typically regard that claim as unjustifiably reading a process into what is largely a claim about patterns only. On pattern cladism, phylogenetic trees are typically regarded as graphical representations of evidence from characters; in that regard, a phylogeny would just be a classification of those characters. For the pattern cladist, directly inferring process or evolutionary history from phylogenies—or, worse, building evolutionary process assumptions into phylogenetic inference—is a mistake. They defend this for numerous reasons, often on philosophical grounds, i.e., that pattern cladism embodies good scientific inference, or that evolutionary claims require additional inferential steps that need to be made explicit (Farris 1983). This has contributed to a split in the larger cladistics community. One upshot of this process/pattern split is that the term ‘cladist’ has become ambiguous, contested, and imprecise, and it is not always clear who gets regarded as what kind of cladist (Carpenter 1987, The Editors 2016, Quinn 2017, Brower 2018a, Williams and Ebach 2018). For example, while pattern cladists reject any a priori assumptions about evolution (Brower 2019), so-called process (or, sometimes, phylogenetic) cladists regard evolutionary claims as foundational to phylogenetics, while others (e.g., statistical phylogeneticists) have distanced themselves from using ‘cladist’ as a label altogether (see  §2.3  and the subsection  §2.3.1  for more on this disputed taxonomy). We recommend that philosophers writing in this area carefully specify the precise sense of ‘cladist/m’, if they use that term at all, and caution against using it interchangeably with ‘phylogenetics’.