Wilkinson (1991a) developed arguments that the distributions of primitive character states may delimit clades, and proposed a method that exploited the evidence of primitive character state distributions for inferring clades. Whiting and Kelly (1995) presented a critique of these ideas, arguing that they are logically incoherent and that the method does not succeed in its aims. This critique severely misrepresents the original arguments and the method, and amounts to no more than an attack on a straw man.