However, Popper’s falsificationism has been criticized and questioned by many philosophers before and it seems to be about time that phylogeneticists develop their own philosophy of phylogenetics that meets their specific requirements of a historical science that is not seeking for universal laws and regularities, but instead reconstructing particular historical events. As a consequence, within a Popperian framework the unfalsifiability of cladograms implies that cladograms cannot explain any present day observation and, thus, represent metaphysical hypotheses.
Three different strategies that have been proposed to circumvent this problem are discussed and refuted: (1) referring to Popper’s convention to renounce ad hoc maneuvers (2) referring to Popper’s treatment of probability hypotheses and (3) decoupling corroboration from falsification. It is shown that the congruence test, which is commonly said to represent a Popperian test of cladograms, instead tests sets of apomorphy hypotheses. No present observation is prohibited by any tree hypothesis and, thus, no Popperian test of cladograms exists. It is shown that cladograms, independent of ‘‘strict’’, ‘‘methodological’’ or ‘‘sophisticated’’ falsification, are not falsifiable in principle. According to Popper, the falsifiability of a hypothesis represents a necessary precondition for its corroborability.
Popper’s falsificationism provides the normative reference system in recent discussions regarding theory and methodology of systematics.
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