Herausgeber: Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde, Rosenstein 1, D-70191 Stuttgart Mainstream Cladistics versus

Mainstream cladistic methods are shown to be fundamentally different from traditional Hennigian phylogenetic systematics, and indeed seem to have more in common with phenet-ics. Like phenetics, the general approach of mainstream cladistics has to be regarded as being rooted in formalism rather than realism. It is explained that parsimony implies more than the minimization of steps in cladograms, and that a priori homologization, polarization, and weighting are inevitable procedures of phylogenetic systematic analysis. Consequently it is concluded that genuine phylogenetic systematics should be preferred over mainstream cladis-tics. Zusammenfassun