Contemporary systematic philosophies

TLDR: This phenetic school of taxonomy had its origins in a series of papers in which several workers attempted to quantify the processes and procedures used by taxonomists to classify organisms, of special interest was the process of weighting.

Abstract: During the past decade, taxonomists have been engaged in a controversy over the proper methods and foundations of biological classification. Although methodologically inclined taxonomists had been discussing these issues for years, the emergence of an energetic and vocal school of taxonomists, headed by Sokal and Sneath, increased the urgency of the dispute. This phenetic school of taxonomy had its origins in a series of papers in which several workers attempted to quantify the processes and procedures used by taxonomists to classify organisms. Of special interest was the process of weighting. These early papers give the impression that the primary motivation for the movement was the desire to make taxonomy sufficiently explicit and precise to permit quantification and, hence, the utilization of computers as aids in classification [22, 23, 41, 91, 106, 107, 111, 112], The initial conclusion that these authors seemed to come to was that taxonomy, as it was then being practiced, was too vague, intuitive, and diffuse to permit quantification. Hence, the procedures and foundations of biological classification had to be changed.