Corrections and Re: Feathers on Bloody Everything

["Jonathan R. Wagner" <znc14@TTACS.TTU.EDU>]

A few bits:
        1) Re: my earlier post on ceratopsian herding... turns out, on
reading some of Lehman's work, nearly everything I said in that post was a
rehash of Lehman points (not jus the attributed stuff). I'd rather not go
back and pick out the one or two statements which were mine alone, so let's
just say the good points were his, the bad ones mine and leave it at that.
        2) As may be evident from Dr. Holtz's post, I goofed on the anchor
taxa for Saurischia. Gauthier defined it as all taxa more closely related to
modern birds than to ORNITHISCHIA, not _Triceratops_. Also, technically, my
wording wasn't all that great on the definitions. I should be shot. :)

And an aside:
Joshua Smith wrote: 
>At the risk of sounding like a broken record, parsimony is an untested
>assumption, and systems violate it constantly.  
        At risk of sounding like a broken record, how is evolution supposed
ot be parsimonious? I have heard that there are some who consider parsimony
to be a "model of evolution". I don't understand this at all. AFAIK,
parsimony is a method of structuring our reasoning on any number of
scientific questions, based on the presumption that the correct answer is
inherent in the set of *all* of the data (a set which can never be
collected, but anyway...), and by chooseing the answer which "corresponds"
best to the data at hand, me make it more likely that our answer will be
closer to the truth. To deny this is to give up on ever finding a better
answer in science. Maybe I was wrong? :)
        So, if therizinosaurs and birds are feathered, why can't their
common ancestor be feathered.

        Wagner

        Wagner
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    Jonathan R. Wagner, Dept. of Geosciences, TTU, Lubbock, TX 79409-1053
"Only those whose life is short can... believe that love is forever"-Lorien