300 Foxes and a Donkey's Jawbone
Despite the rigorous application of philosophical ploys to guard against circular reasoning in cladistic analysis it's a poster boy for circular reasoning because it's based in a paradigm which is the result of personal bias.
In 1991 we (me and the Holy Spirit) scared the faculty at Duke by demonstrating a flaw in the use of cladistic phylogenetic analysis to study the Devonian fossil Archaeopteris.
We're critical of the philosophical construction of the scientific method because it's been meticulously crafted to exclude any possibility that the truth can be either an acceptable premise, or a possible conclusion.
In spherogenetic systematics Fish is a higher rank than Whale. The fish of the sea is everything created in the hydrosphere. Whale is a subcategory. The thing that swallowed Jonah was both a fish and a whale.
Cladistic phylogenetic analysis works by grouping species based on shared derived characteristics (synapomorphies). All of the members of a homologous group have a common ancestor.
Cladistic phylogenetic analysis is circular reasoning based on personal bias.