 Regardless of whether disputes about taxonomic philosophy died down because systematists came to agree or because they became less important, it is a mistake for philosophers to treat the Systematics Wars as a live dispute, as opposed to an historical one. Yet, it remains an important episode in the history of systematics, and the core conceptual debates left their mark on contemporary debates in phylogenetics (Haber 2009). At stake was not merely what notion of “relatedness” systematists ought to adopt, but what constituted good science in the context of inferring history and constructing classifications, and the relative value (and even coherence) of concepts like objectivity, testability, and repeatability in science. But systematists no longer dispute whether phylogenetic inference may be justified as a scientific activity, but, rather, over how best to carry it out. A large part of why this change took place has to do with the availability of new sources of molecular data and the introduction of new methods to take advantage of it. It is to this history that we now turn.