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RE: A plea to theropod workers- Code the Taxa in Your Analyses
Very well ...
To wit:
Verily,
It doth be true then, speaking a'fore the highest in the heavens, that yon
etymology doth spake most true of thine most simplistic interpretations.
...err ... aside from the horribly bad prose:
David wrote:
<That would make every phylogenetic tree a cladogram.
We have two terms, and we have two meanings that often need to be
distinguished...>
I replied:
<Based solely on the etymology, one would have to side with Tom and Brad:
Mickey's preferential analysis is preferrable, in my opinion, to precede the
formation of a cladogram through a phylogenetic matrix, but it is hardly
synonymous to have a thourough analytical process to both preceed and follow
the formation of a tree (especially when TNT [which is FREE, Brad] and PAUP
create THOUSANDS of cladograms) and be identical to said formation.>
This single, whole sentence is utter garbage, and I shouldn't have composed
it this way. I think I left a few things out, and the parsing in my head was
much cleaner, but of course like most ideas, pick and choose when you think
them. Sometimes I'm more cohesive, but in other times I am very jumbled
depending on how fast I'm thinking (my fingers are not as fast as my thoughts,
and I hardly look at what I'm typing when I do.
So ... "cladogram" and "phylogenetic tree" are not synonymous. They are
certainly not even the product of the same analysis (in the strictest sense, it
takes a second analysis to combine all resultant trees, and an additional one
to pare it back for parsimony, and another one to jackknife it, etc. even
though some systems separate these as functions and others do not but automate
it in the main function).
As noted before, one is a stylized idea of the other, and the former is often
based only on parts of the results of a single phylogenetic analysis, usually
the consensus tree -- which is not itself the product of any single analysis
but a combination of thousands of different analyses, each with its own end
tree. When you replied with the above to Tom's support of Brad (based on my
reading -- you never cite your respondents), you conflated these without
distinguishing the two ideas you note above:
<Who cares about dictionaries? :-) A cladogram is the result of a
cladistic analysis. Not every representation of a phylogenetic
hypothesis is a cladogram.>
Tom, who was contesting the idea of these two terms being similar, is correct
here, as I see it. Textbook defintions also separate the two terms (at least
the two I recall reading do, but now cannot remember the authors of as they
were years ago).
Cheers,
Jaime A. Headden
"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B. Medawar (1969)
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