Nothing is more sure than that the illusion of "a single tree of life" is just an illusion

Cladistics (1) conflates entities with classes, (2) assumes that such entity-classes are real, and (3) assumes that these entity-classes have originated by dichotomous splitting from a single ancestral entity-class. It thus appears extremely complicated, but the conceptual mess just fulfills one purpose - to confuse entities with classes and thus substitute entities with classes.

This substitution does, however, encounter one serious problem: whereas entities are allocated into classes on the basis of two kinds of differences: generic and specific, classes are in cladistics joined into other classes based on just one kind of similarities. This problem means that cladistics is consistently contradictory ending in a paradoxical contradiction, which is traditionally called Russell's paradox but which cladistics calls "the tree of life". The substitution thus turns the consistent scientific approach into a consistently inconsistent approach ending in paradox.

Cladistics is thus actually serious conceptual confusion aiming at creating an illusion that the dream of "a single tree of life" is a real possibility. This is indeed a desirable objective, but it does not promote understanding of reality. The hard fact is instead that this dream is, just this, a dream. There are actually several just as true such "trees of life", because classes are not real and they have thus not originated by dichotomous splitting from an ancestral class. Fact is instead that the illusion of "a single tree of life" is securely isolated from reality by both its internal contradiction and the continuous change of reality. To become a reality, it has to overcome its own internal contradiction and stop the world. Nothing is thus more sure than that this illusion is indeed just an illusion.