Abstract
We were reticent to respond to Craig (2011), for worry that this might lead to an ongoing, futile exchange on who does and who does not understand homology and the workings of systematics. No reply, too, would be a reply of a sort. However, Craig's missive provides an opportunity to explore additional aspects of the issues/crises at hand. Before we do so, we would point out that in Mooi & Gill (2010a) we did not say that molecules cannot provide homology (as Craig implied), but instead argued that current popular methods are phenetic and do not discover this homology. Numerical methods do not differentiate homology from homoplasy in morphology consistently, either, and thus are a disservice to the molecular and morphological evidence; the phenograms produced do not necessarily appropriately or accurately reflect the relationships the data can provide.
NSTL