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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mysticete" data-source="post: 1605679" data-attributes="member: 67784">With the caveat that I am not a geneticist:Genetic distance is useful, but is relative and can't really be used as and independent scale, since some groups do seem to evolve faster than others, and so might accumulate genetic differences faster.  It's probably useful, for say comparing a single family of continental birds, but probably not useful otherwise.AFAIK someone did publish a classification scheme based solely on genetic distance (I have the paper...somewhere).  However you get hilarious results like recognizing Drosophila as a linnean order, while most bird families would be reduced to one species, or something like that.</blockquote>