concept

Phenetics

A way of classifying organisms by overall morphological similarity - count as many shared features as possible, then group the species that look most alike. It sounds reasonable, but it has a fatal flaw: it cannot distinguish resemblance from inheritance (true kinship) from resemblance by convergence (coincidence). So it readily lumps together species that merely *look* alike. Cladistics arose to replace it, by trusting only shared *derived* traits rather than raw similarity.