re: Pisanosaurus and Effigia

[Mike Taylor <mike@indexdata.com>]

David Peters writes:
 > We should all eye with suspicion any matrix that uses any published
 > matter for data. Right? Or for that matter, we should eye all data
 > matrices no matter their source with suspicion. After all this is
 > science and we should test everything. Trust nothing.

Darned right and straight up!  In my (admittedly limited) experience
of checking the codings in other people's matrix, every single taxon
has multiple mistakes -- some of them clear-cut.

I am sure that's not because I am so much more awesome than they are
(:-) but simply because cladistic coding is difficult, tedious and
error-prone.  For anyone who doubts me, I urge you to take a recent
cladistic study of a group you're familiar with, and go through the
scored for the single taxon that you know best.  I think you will be
frightened by the results.

That's one reason why all our phylogenetic hypotheses should be
treated much less as gospel than we currently tend to treat them.  I'm
sure people who've been working in the field for a while already know
this, but it took me a while to catch on so I'm mentioning it for the
benefit of anyone else on the list who's coming up to speed.

 _/|_    ___________________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor    <mike@indexdata.com>    http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
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         ..." -- Monty Python's Flying Circus.