Finally, it should not be forgotten that drawing up a phyloge-netic treeshould notbe a goal in itself, but a means towards a better understanding of evolution. Molecules may help us to get a better insight into the evolution of particular characters (such as the disappearance of vein M2 in the hind wing in Hesperioidea as described above) or show us that a supposed synapomorphy actually is a parallelism, as the dwindling anepisternum in Papil-ionidae is, if its new position is further supported. A robust phylogeny is also helpful in detecting underlying synapomorphies,as seem to abound in Hesperioidea (e.g. male secondary sexual characters) or reversals, which may be called an extreme form of underlying synapomorphies. In a group of taxa with an underlying synapomorphy, the taxon that does notshow it is like a hard disk on which information is present, but not accessible because of an electronic block. In due course the molecules may tell us what the
molecular block is for an underlying synapomorphy, but there is still a long way to go. For the time being, we can only draw hypotheses about underlying synapomorphies from a robust phylogeny, not the other way around..