 Parsimony techniques have grown more sophisticated, and, as larger data sets have been assessed and bigger trees constructed, justifications of parsimony approaches advanced and adapted. Early on, much of this took place in the context of the Systematics Wars  (§1.2.1),  where a premium was placed on defending approaches as properly scientific. Thus, these debates tended to veer into philosophy of science, with systematists disputing what counted as doing good science in the context of inferring history. This helps explain the influence of  Karl Popper’s  work  . Early proponents of parsimony were attracted to Popper’s falsificationist account of the scientific method, both in the way it provided demarcation criteria for scientific activity, and in the way it was positioned as critical of  logical positivist  approaches. Falsificationist justifications were employed to criticize numerical taxonomists as verificationists relying on flawed hypothetico-deductive methods.