Re: New alvarezsaurid

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

Tracy Ford wrote:
>That depends on who's doing the cladigram and how much they end up tweeking the
>answers. I've heard my far share of paleontologist say that they didn't like 
>how the cladgram came out and they had to tweek it to get what they wanted.
        Cladistics is like other scientific processes in that it produces
hypotheses which are testable and reproducable. If someone suspects that an
analysis has been "tweaked", they can re-evaluate the dataset and rerun the
analysis. Practitioners of any method of phylogenetic analysis are not
infallable. At least we now have the ability, with the advent of cladistics,
to evaluate their hypotheses from a more objective standpoint than personal
oppinion.
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    Jonathan R. Wagner, Dept. of Geosciences, TTU, Lubbock, TX 79409-1053
                   "The truth points to itself" - Kosh