WHAT'S GOING ON?

["Matthew Troutman" <m_troutman@hotmail.com>]

<<Although I don't like the Feducciaries and their disdain for cladist
analysis, I also don't like the strict cladists and their disdain
for selective eclectic classification.>>

Actually Ernst Mayr is a bigger (and probably more effective) critic of 
cladists than Feduccia will ever be.

What is selective eclectic classification?  (Sounds like an oxymoron.)

<<When strict cladists respond in this way, and infer that someone
doesn't know the difference between dinosaurs (sensu stricto) and dinosaurs 
(sensu lato, i.e., including birds), I think they hurt not only
cladistic classification (which I use up to a point), but also cladistic
analytical methods (which I find very valuable).>>

How?  The driving force of life is evolution.  To exclude birds from the 
rest of dinosaurs is not an evolutionary perspective.

<<This insistence that the rest of world recognize their terminology,
and making fun of those who don't distinguish between dinosaurs (sensu 
stricto) and a cladistic dinosauria (sensu lato), will only backfire, and I 
would discourage such tactics.  I could care less if it turns people  off to 
strict cladistic classification, but when it casts a cloud over  cladistic 
analytic methodologies, then it really starts to irritate me.>>

Without getting myself involved in whatever matter you are discussing let me 
give you some historical perspective on cladistic vs. Linnean (or whatever) 
classification:

As I said above, cladistic classification is grounded in evolutionary 
thought, where everything shares a common ancestor at some point on the tree 
of life.  Defining groups by their common ancestry is not only convenient, 
it makes sure that we will not be excluding organisms from the group in the 
future, it is also evolutionary.  We have a more accurate picture of life 
and how it changed because rather than vaguely tracing ancestries and 
lineages on the Linnean chart (or whatever), we can identify where, for 
example, birds and cabbages had their last known common ancestor.  We can't 
do this as well in Linnean (or whatever) classifications.

Linnean classifications were popular for a couple hundred years.  The reason 
they were so popular for the first hundred years of their existence is 
because they lent themselves to the predominantly non-evolutionary 
classifications of the 18th and 19th centuries.  Birds and reptiles sat on 
seperate ends of the Linnean chart seperated by a gulf seemingly larger than 
any systematist could bridge.  Essensialism (going back to Plato), 
archetypalism, and typology, non-evolutionary theories of thought were 
easily accomodated by the Linnean system.  Since relationships weren't 
inferred by Linnean taxonomy, essensialist, non-evolutionist, systems such 
as typology could be utilized to their full potential; there would be no 
muddy areas in the chart where reptiles changed into birds, the basic types 
(the very root of the word typology) would never change.  The very face of 
nature, that is evolution, would be ignored.

Linnean classification could be converted over to evolutionary perspectives, 
but things get confusing:

Say I have a small proto-animal, lets call it _Tyler durden_.  It is the 
sole member of the family Tyleridae.  Now, we know that this animal is the 
closest thing to the Kingdom Animalia; it is *almost* an animal, but not 
quite.  One of the first animals is _Marla singer_, seperated from _Tyler_ 
by being in the rank of Kingdom instead of Family.  From the cladistic 
perspective, _Tyler_ and _Marla_ share a common ancestor but _Tyler_ is 
excluded from the group _Marla_ is in by the fact that she has an ancestor 
that _Tyler_ does not have.  On a Linnean chart, such relationships are 
difficult to convey because they are not inherently evolutionary, cladistic 
classifications are by their nature built to convey evolutionary 
relationships.  This is why they are so successful; their structure is not a 
simple catalouge, they are a tree showing the relative evolutionary 
relationships of one group to another (and so on).  Cladistic trees do not 
give direct ancestor-descendent relationships on the large scale, they can 
only give more vague relations because human scientists were not living back 
600 million years ago to witness the birth of animals; the only way we can 
be scientific is by not explicitly positing ancestor-descendent 
relationships, and letting the trees speak for themselves.  Only with 
greater magnification on the branches of the tree (and perhaps the 
physically impossible time machine), can we tell ancestor-descendent 
relationships.  Until then, we have to be scientific and say only what we 
know for sure.

<<Making fun, explicitly or implicitly, of those who don't specify 
"non-avian  dinosaurs" should realize that it is not longer humorous, and 
the point they may trying to make is counterproductive.  Alex was looking 
for information, and all he got was implicit criticism, and I don't think 
this is helpful.>>

I haven't read the message that read up to this, so I won't comment on it.

Anyway, saying "non-avian dinosaurs" is the scientfically accurate way of 
describing what classical dinosaurs are.  By not including birds within 
dinosaurs we are going back to the days of typology where birds were 
seperate from everything else on the planet (as were dinosaurs).  We most 
express things they way that they are, evolutionarily.  To exclude birds 
from dinosaurs, not being in keeping with the evidence at hand and certainly 
not looking at it evolutionarily.
Matt Troutman
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