It is argued that the practice of expressing all phylogenetic relationships as cladistic relationships (i.e. splittings, those expressed only in the form of dichotomous sister group relationships) gives an incomplete and therefore potentially misleading view of evolutionary history. Consequently such schemes tend to supply hypotheses that fail to mirror evolutionary descent. Application of shared derived characters to set up phylogenetic hypotheses is a mere consequence of establishing morphocline polarities. Therefore, the test of a phylogenetic hypothesis lies in the soundness of biological (developmental, functional, etc.) investigations of character clines. The challenging issue then is the testability of morphocline polarity hypotheses, rather than competing phylogenetic schemes. Age of any phenon is one of its attributes, its fourth dimension. In addition to those same considerations as are employed in dealing with sister group hypotheses (shared-derived characters), ancestordescendant hypotheses may also be tested by the temporal position of the taxon. According to the Popperian view of scientific criteria, postulated ancestor-descendant relationships may be falsified by biostratigraphic evidence, and therefore such hypotheses are as “scientific” as those of a sister–group nature. Phylogenetic trees are preferred over cladograms because the former always contain more information since they can express both ancestor-descendant relationships (anagenesis) as well as sister group relationships (cladogenesis). A brief synopsis is offered for the procedure to establish historical relationships of taxa.