Re: Martin 2004 critique (somewhat lengthy)

["Jaime A. Headden" <qilongia@yahoo.com>]

Phil Bigelow (bigelowp@juno.com) wrote:

<And, ironically, you have made *my* point.  How can Martin effectively
communicate with people like Sereno if Martin doesn't even use (or respect) the
same nomenclature as Sereno?>

  It is possible to communicate effectively with someone on a subject common to
both when your language differs in how you represent phylogeny. Both men are
anatomists, and it comes down, as clear in the Jones, Farlow, et al. paper on
*Caudipteryx*, to common use of anatomy without phylogenetic or cladistic
arguments to interpret the data. They simply use different ideas in regarding
the relationships of animals. There is _always_ a pick-and-choose argument in
selecting characters, and oft-times it is arbitrary, and sometimes it _must_ be
arbitrary. The disagreement over birds as dinosaurs was reformulated in the
60's through to the 80's and up to now, rather than using the
turn-of-the-century arguments of Huxley versus Owen that crowned the debate so
long ago. So there was a basis for the argument that is implicit on
interpretation of anatomy, the common tongue.

  Cheers,

Jaime A. Headden

  Little steps are often the hardest to take.  We are too used to making leaps 
in the face of adversity, that a simple skip is so hard to do.  We should all 
learn to walk soft, walk small, see the world around us rather than zoom by it.

"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B. Medawar (1969)


                
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