Re: Occam's bulldozer & natural selection & ceratopsians

["Jaime A. Headden" <qilongia@yahoo.com>]

  Just a bit before the post: bear in mind, I am reading into this from
Kris' post so any mistakes are mine, not his:

  Wasn't "Occam's Bulldozer" as coined here by Kris Kripchak a concept to
denote one man shoving his theory onto the multitudes as more likely and
"right", and pushing away the opposition? Saying that this so and so is
more likely in his opinion, and then blasting or ignoring the opposition
to favor his own concept?

Stephan Pickering (stefanpickering2002@yahoo.com) wrote:

<A BRIEF REPLY: without being necessarily redundant, I point to: @ 9000
living species of theropods, lineages descended from the clades surviving
the K/T events.>

  I hope this is not being used to infer extant behavior on a extinct set
of groups. For one thing, all living birds form a single group, and it is
unreasonable to expect that any group should have similar behavior based
on knowledge of another, no matter how closely related. This even more so
when considering that bird species vary in their courting behavior,
parental care given, or flocking behavior (and lack of it) in even closely
related species and larger grouping taxa. Using the flocking,
well-garnered care given, and elaborate courting of some species and then
inferring this into extinct animals is not tenable, something said many
times. You need to pick a species and show how a given behavior is more
likely to be prevalent among birds than not, before you begin to infer to
anything extinct. Otherwise, its like saying all dinosaurs were brightly
decorated and bobbed their heads and built nests to attract females to
come breed with them, and formed pair-bonds within herd structures which
acted like flamingo flocks (which are temporary, mind).

  Incidentally, Stu's concept had nothing to do with herd behavior in the
sense of developing towards it, it referred to genome complexity
development and if I remember correctly, was based largely on the Cambrian
Explosion, including the various works involving evolution of body plans
and types, cell definition versus floating blobs or amoebae.

  Cheers,

=====
Jaime A. Headden

  Little steps are often the hardest to take.  We are too used to making leaps 
in the face of adversity, that a simple skip is so hard to do.  We should all 
learn to walk soft, walk small, see the world around us rather than zoom by it.

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