Re: No substitute for seeing a specimen: Hone blog

[Mike Taylor <mike@indexdata.com>]

On 8 May 2010 22:55, David Peters <davidpeters@att.net> wrote:
>> David Hone is right.  Photos are no substitute for seeing a specimen.
>>
>> Sorry.  That's how it is.
>
> References?
>
> Experiments?
>
> Mike, with your "That's how it is" paradigm we would have no relativity, no 
> integrated baseball and the earth would be the center of a tiny universe only 
> a few thousand years old.

All Right, Dave.  Unlike some other list members, I've always made the
effort to treat your work with respect.  That's over now.  With this
message, you've crossed a line.  You equate the preferential use of
fossils over photographs with institutionalised racism?  That doesn't
quite invoke Godwin's law, but it's close enough that I'm not going to
bother playing this game any more.

Just in case anyone else was too dim to understand this perfectly
simple thing: "That's how it is" is not a REASON to adhere to the
status quo, but a DESCRIPTION of what has been established, by
scientific inquiry as orthodox.  So if Dave Peters comes to me and
says "My tracings of aeriel photographs show that the Earth is flat",
I will reply "No, the earth is round; that's how it is".  Because
something that has been so emphatically and repeatedly demonstrated is
not worth the energy of arguing about.  We're done with that.  Move
on.

(And this, of course, is why David Hone isn't pissing away his time
playing your stupid games.  As you'll have noticed from his impressive
recent record, he's spending that time on writing papers instead --
doing science.  Proper, reproducible science based on actual fossils
rather than JPEG artifacts and the phase of the moon.  I might suggest
that you go and do likewise but the last few years have clearly
demonstrated that you won't.  So I'll leave it there.)

*headdesk*