John Harshman is also Proud to be Ignorant of Nested Hierarchies

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John Harshman is willfully clueless. He sez:

Now, I believe in ancestors (and I can describe them in many particulars based on phylogenetic reconstruction, but that’s not relevant) because their existence is the only explanation for the nested hierarchy of life.

And yet Linnaean Classification is a nested hierarchy of life and it doesn't have anything to do with Common Descent or evolution. Also phylogenies are NOT a nested hierarchy, moron:

Understanding Phylogenies- Look at the diagrams. Every node is an alleged common ancestor. And every node is also a separate level. With nested hierarchies the levels consist of and contain lower levels. Yet the ancestral populations do NOT consist of nor do they contain their descendants. That is a simple concept yet it seems to be way over the heads of the TSZ ilk.

Se also:

The use of hierarchies as organizational models in systematics

The whole paper is useful but for this argument start on the bottom of page 9- HENNIG’S USE OF HIERARCHIES. UC Berkley, and all the other evos are making the same mistake as Henning did. But hey, it's only been corrected for decades so I can understand why they haven't caught on:

Hennig (1966: 70–72) presented in his fig. 18 (my Fig. 3, with parts of the figure labelled a and b instead of I and II) two different graphic representations of a hierarchic system that he regarded as corresponding exactly to one another. Figure 3a is a modified Venn diagram that depicts a nested hierarchy. As mentioned above, a fully nested hierarchy displays the property of summativity. This model constitutes an important special case because the organizational criterion is containment (Allen &Hoekstra,1984).Entities at a higher level of organization contain, or are composed of, entities at the next lower level of organization. In this case, the whole is the sum of the parts. Hierarchies that employ organizational criteria other than containment may be referred to as non-nested, and these do not display summativity (Allen & Hoekstra, 1984). Figure 3b is an arrow diagram that represents species begetting species. This could be interpreted as a linear representation of history (a directed, non-reticulate network), or, as Hennig intended, as a non-nested hierarchy with ancestor-descendant relationship as the organizational criterion.

Contrary to Hennig’s statement (1966: 70), a and b in Figure 3 do not correspond exactly, a point made earlier by Simpson (1961: 62–63) using virtually identical diagrams (his fig. 3A, C). These two models differ because life, as an evolving system, is innovative and generative. In Figure 3b, ‘stem species’ 1 (for convenience, Species 1) is the ancestor of Species 2 and Species 5, which are in turn ancestors to their descendants. In Figure 3a, the numbers associated with Species 1 through 5 indicate the monophyletic groups of terminal species derived from various ancestral species. Although Species 1 may have given rise to the terminal species, the ancestral Species 1 is clearly not the same as the set of (or not equal to the sum of) the terminal species.  

Read the paper and buy a vowel, John