Abstract
In the late 1970s, intense and sometimes acrimonious discussions between the recently established phylogeneticists/cladists and the proponents of the long-standing ‘gradistic’ school of systematics transcended specialized periodicals to reach a significantly wider audience through the journal Nature (Halstead, 1978, 1981; Gardiner et al., 1979; Halstead et al., 1979). As is well known, cladistis ‘won’ the debate by showing convincingly that mere similarity or ‘adaptive levels’ were not decisive measures to establish kinship. The essay ‘The salmon, the lungfish and the cow: a reply’ by Gardiner et al. (1979) epitomized that debate, deliberating to a wider audience the foundations of the cladistic paradigm, advocating that shared derived characters (homologies) support a sister-group relationship between the lungfish and cow exclusive of the salmon (see also Rosen et al., 1981; Forey et al., 1991).