Re: FUCHSIA and the Ostrom Symposium Volume

["David Marjanovic" <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

> Errmm, isn't the basic axiom of cladism based around the (logically
> untenable) assumption that evoultion follows the path that's "easier"
> (i.e.most parsimonious)?

Almost. :-) As long as there's no weighting, it's assumed that all steps are
equally easy, so the MPT (most parsimonious tree) is the one with the
smallest number of steps, not that with the smallest number of difficult
steps. Of course the assumption that all steps are equally easy is nonsense.
But... in morphology, we don't know what steps are how much easier than what
others, so any weighting would be at least as wrong as no weighting.
Therefore we are limited to maximum parsimony... it's the best of all bad
methods. :-)

*************************************
Is that funny... I really forgot Jurassic Park... :-D