 Wiley (1975) provides a representative example of a falsificationist defense of parsimony that proved deeply influential, e.g., Eldredge &amp; Cracraft (1980) adopt Wiley’s core justification in their influential textbook, as does Farris (1983) in his impactful defense of parsimony. On Wiley’s account, each taxonomic character is treated as an homology, and considered independently of all others. For each homology, a tree hypothesis is generated that requires the fewest number of evolutionary changes to explain the pattern of character distribution across taxa. These are hypotheses of homology and, on the falsificationist account, these hypotheses are mutually testable. That is, the tree hypotheses generated for each character constitutes a test of the trees hypothesized for every other character; falsified hypotheses of homology are treated as ad hoc assumptions of homoplasy. The maximum parsimony tree is that topology which generates the fewest falsified hypotheses of homology, and is regarded as the most corroborated tree. Adding new characters or taxa constitutes further testing of these hypotheses, and generates more potential falsifiers. In this way, parsimony is simultaneously a mode of tree construction and evaluation (Haber 2009); Wiley (1975), Eldredge and Cracraft (1980), and Farris (1983) describe this as a logical basis of reasoning about phylogenetic inference, citing the philosophical justification of falsificationism.