Re: Martin 2004 critique

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

Mickey Mortimer (Mickey_Mortimer111@msn.com) wrote:

<It's been a while since I've had the pleasure of critiquing an ABSRD paper.>

  Unfortunately, once you've critiqued one paper from this apparent particular
pool of thought with it's particular devices (parallelling arguments between
Vrba and Dawkins, perhaps), then you've critiqued them all. In the last decade
little new data has been used in support of the ideas, and in fact radical
variation has occured in some portions thereof which still remains inconsistent
with current data or even the systematics used to support their own theories.
An example is Martin's recent advocacy of birds as relatives of dromaeosaurids,
BUT, with dromaeosaurids as NON-DINOSAURS. One must realize that the issue here
at hand is not just a brand of phylogenetic reconstruction, but the idea of
birds as reptiles, which a good deal of biologists still argue is untrue. Not
that they argue so because they think birds are some other form of organisms,
but because of the nature and history of "reptile." Words with baggage to them.

  Take a side parallel and delve into the researches of hominoid studies,
wherein multiregionalism conflicts with Out of Africa theories, including the
idea of multi-successional waves of African emmigrants into Asia. There are
people who will twist, cajole and casually reject any data that does not agree
with their own condition. Parsimony data is employed at full strength, but in
the end an element is dismissed because there are properties in that element
that make it less viable to that researcher. Such is the case in Ruben et al.s
arguments, wherein innate physiological information would lead them to conclude
that the air-sac driven rigid-lung breathing system could NOT have so easily
developed from the hepatic piston or pelvic aspiration arguments they had
previously implied more likely to be the case in several key taxa. After
several years of Greg Paul's counter argument in _Dinosaurs of the Air_, the
most recent Ruben, Jones, Hillenius et al. paper cites more recent work but
ignores Paul's. Sometimes, to get a point across, you have to break a few eggs
... or pretend they do not exist, like that there are several birds with no
respiratory turbinates and very, very small nasal passages for their body size
but whioch maintain homeothermic metabolic stasis throughout the day's
activities.

  Call it good when NO one agrees with ANYONE. Then you'll start making
progress, perhaps.

  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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