Phenetics

We have seen in Chapter 6 and the previous chapters that dissatisfaction with traditional taxonomy gave rise, after the Second World War, to two distinct attempts at a remedy - phenetics and cladistics.

Microbial systematics has enjoyed two major advances in the latter half of this century: the introductions of numerical phenetics and molecular techniques for direct comparisons of organismal genomes. Numerical phenetics (taxonomy) was very influential during the 1960s and 70s in providing the first objective approach to bacterial classification.

One of the most famous and fully developed arguments along these lines, was a justification for phenetics, a school of systematic thought that proposed mathematical methods for grouping organisms based on measurements of similarity (Sokal and Sneath 1963).