Re: Underlying basis of classification (Was: Re Dinobirds)

[Philidor11@aol.com]

Thanks, Dr. Brochu!

There's one final point on which my 'You're not getting it' bell has gone 
off, and I'm going to have to work on it.  This does not appear to be one of 
Priestly's 2 logics situations (the difference between science/math and 
what?, popular logic; for example, the use of infinity in calculus is a real 
stumbling block for me, I have to substitute 'gets larger or smaller' but 
that means the area of a circle is ultimately unknowable...), so I expect I 
will be able to understand your point here.

The difficulty arises from:

In a message dated 7/18/99 1:44:22 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
cbrochu@fmppr.fmnh.org writes:

You said:  << But it doesn't create ancestors!  It creates hierarchies.  We 
interpret
branching points as ancestors, but the algorithms are simply creating a
hierarchy that we humans like to read as a branching diagram.  We could
just as easily depict it with paragraphs or Venn diagrams.>>
I had said:  <<In terms of what you're saying, the ancestor is implicit in 
the hierarchies of relationship; if there is a node there must be an 
ancestor.  You'd produce the same result by saying there is a set of all 
possible ancestors, an ancestor for animals in every combination; the program 
just eliminates the implausible ones.>>
You said:  <<No, this would not be the same thing.>>

See, to me when you say 'we interpret branching points as ancestors' it means 
the same thing as 'the ancestor is implicit in the hierarchies of 
relationship; if there is a node there must be an ancestor'.  And it seems a 
chicken/egg issue to ask whether the program works in terms of character 
alone or ancestor/character combined because both implicitly come into 
'existence' simultaneously.
To put it in terms of your family analogy, if you tell me you have sisters I 
immediately know that you and your sisters have a father, the same father.  I 
also know it's likely his name is Brochu in the same way I'd know that the 
ancestor had the characters used to diagnose the relationship to some 
(perhaps minimal) degree.
The program mechanism could work as:  there is a man named Brochu, right?  
There are sons and daughters named Brochu.  Then yes, there is probably a man 
named Brochu.
This makes the sons/daughters confirm the ancestor rather than having the 
ancestor dependent upon the descendants.  I was taking dependent upon as 
equivalent to defining...

Okay, thinking aloud.
Anyway, thanks again.
By the way, where I went to school the Teachers were called Mr., so it's my 
title of respect.  I switched to Dr. here because it's more regular, and I 
don't want to be confusing.