What cladists don't understand

What cladists don't understand is the fact that conflation is contradiction.

If we, for example, conflate the category humans with the category chimps into one category (ie, what cladists comprehend as the ancestor of and humans and chimps, but which actually is a claimed category we can call human-chimps, then this category is in practice a paradoxical claim (assertion, hypothesis) that there is a category of the contradictory class human-chimp. This class has the contradictory properties of both humans and chimps, and the ancestor is thus paradoxically contradictory between the two categories humans and chimps. It means that cladists think they have nailed a "relationship group", when they actually have claimed a paradoxically contradictory category of a contradictory class (ie, the class human-chimp). Cladists thus don't understand what they are doing.

Some cladists understand, or feel, the inconsistency of typifying categories (eg, Mikael Härlin) and the founders of the PhyloCode, and instead try to define clades only in terms of relationship. This does not, however, escape the fact that conflation is contradiction, since clades still conflate the classes before and after. This conflation is probably the most difficult to understand for cladists (as well as for all of us). When pointing at this conflation, cladists respond: so what? An entity may well be both before and after at the same time, or...? This rhetorical question does not, however, address the problem, but just cladists' own conflation. The answer to the question depends on whether entities are real or not. If they are real, then they can indeed be both before and after at the same time, whereas if they are artificial constructs, then they can't be both before and after at the same time per definition. The problem for cladists is that they both assume as an axiom that entities are artificial constructs, meaning that they can't be both before and after at the same time, and claim (assert) that they can be both before and after at the same time. The problem for cladists is thus that they exclude the possibility that entities can be both before and after at the same time, at the same time as they claim (assert) that they can. Cladists thus both assume and claim that entities can't and can be both before and after at the same time, respectively. This incompatible assumption and claim is actually the cladistic contradiction (hypocrisy) in a nutshell: if entities can't be both before and after at the same time, then cladists are inconsistent, whereas if entities can be both before and after at the same time, then cladists' axiom is wrong. Cladists are thus either inconsistent or wrong. And, since cladists are consistent, they have to be consistently inconsistent.

Cladists thus don't understand, actually refuse to understand, that conflation is contradiction. Instead, they only acknowledge contradiction.