Is cladistics a new approach?

Cladists think that cladistics is a new approach. Nothing could be more wrong. Already Aristotle discussed clades in terms of genera with their species.

The problem with such "things" (ie, clades, or genera with their species) is, however, to join them without contradiction. This problem did Linné solve about 2,000 years later. About 150 years later, Darwin presented his theory on the origin of biodiversity vizualizing it with a bifurcating tree graph he stated illustrated "the origin of species". What Darwin didn't mention, however, was that such bifurcating process also can be illustrated with a node-based tree graph, that these two types of tree graphs are orthogonal, and that such process thus in practice can't be illustrated unambiguously. (Whether this oversight was due to ignorance of this fact or not is impossible to say).

The only new property of cladistics is thus that it conflates node-based graphs with stem-based graphs, thereby creating the impression that the result IS the process itself, resulting in that it gets the fact that bifurcating processes can't be illustrated unambiguously up-side-down. Instead of understanding that it means that an unambiguous such process can't be found, it thinks that the problem is to find one. It is thus a direct running into the ditch from Linné's classification system and Darwin's process model by conflating them into an imaginary classification of a process model that is paradoxically contradictory in a real sense per definition. It does thus not have a single right. This property of cladistics, ie, not having a single right, is the only property that distinguishes it from all other approaches. Only it is totally wrong. Its concept of "clades" does, however, date back to at least the ancient Greeks. Cladistics just takes the irrational route from there, conflating both them and everything else.

Cladistics is thus a new approach only in that it is the irrational way of joining clades, when the Linnean system is the rational way. Cladistics can thus consistently be called irrational cladistics, when Linnean systematics is rational cladistics. It is just an orthogonal conceptual rotation around the fact that bifurcating processes can't be illustrated unambiguously. A play with concepts around a phenomenon that can't be unambiguously nailed with concepts.