Re: Nomina Dubia Part II: Rapator

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

>  I admit the system is subjective.  This is a gray area: nomina dubia
>  are in the eye of the beholder.  But I think this is OK.  On that
>  point, David M. made this statement:
>
> > As soon as you can't answer the question "if I were wrong, how would
> > I know?" any longer, you're not doing science.
>
>  I think this is too harsh when applied to paleontology and biology,
>  because frequently we deal in probabilities, rather than absolute
>  certainties.  That's why statistics are so important.  For example,
>  one phylogeny does not *disprove* another phylogeny; one phylogeny is
>  only deemed more probable based on a set of pre-determined
>  assumptions (such as parsimony).

This is the same in all of science. For instance, the big advance of 
quantum physics over classical physics is the use of statistics and 
probabilities.

I think you're selling parsimony short. Falsification and parsimony are 
the two parts of the scientific method, as far as I can see.

So, let's simply assume I included "unparsimonious" in "wrong"... :-)