Page "Phenetics" Paragraph 7

Traditionally there was a great deal of heated debate between pheneticists and cladists, as both methods were initially proposed to resolve evolutionary relationships.

Perhaps the " high-water mark " of phenetics were the DNA-DNA hybridization studies by Charles G. Sibley, Jon E. Ahlquist and Burt L. Monroe Jr., from which resulted the 1990 Sibley-Ahlquist taxonomy for birds.

Highly controversial at its time, some of its findings ( e. g. the Galloanserae ) have been vindicated, while others ( e. g. the all-inclusive " Ciconiiformes " or the " Corvida ") have been rejected.

However, with computers growing increasingly powerful and widespread, more refined cladistic algorithms became available and could put the suggestions of Willi Hennig to the test ; as it turned out, the results of cladistic analyses turned out to be superior to those of phenetic methods-at least when it came to resolving phylogenies.