Re: Kileskus etc....

[Jaime Headden <qi_leong@hotmail.com>]

  To forestall further private emails to me in which I am characterized in one 
form or another, I am going to make more blanket statements about myself which 
should be apparent to some of you, but others are prone to ignore or have never 
read:

  1. I am a supporter of the cladistic "revolution," which is as far as I am 
going to go on that statement as concerns a "scientist" (I am fairly sure some 
of you think I am not, and that may depend on the definition).

  2. I absolutely dislike ranks -- based on the sole criterion that they are 
completely and absolutely unscientific.  Perhaps this should say something 
about me.

  3. I like to discuss and debate, so I will say thing to provoke discussion 
and debate, which sometimes does not work out well for my case, or causes 
heated and/or personal comments to fly --- which I at least try to withhold 
from my side of the argument.

  4. I have a fuzzy memory, so I tend not to cite as many things as some others 
do --- largely due to the fact that my document collection is in tatters or 
scattered in different states.  So I tend to backtrack for fuzzy memory ... and 
I always admit when I am wrong on a detail.

  5. In the specific circumstance, I posted a comment made within a paper 
referring to a tautology, and the ensuing discussion rendering the essential 
meaning of clade and monophyletic [noun], and the use of the phrase 
"paraphyletic clade" came up.  This was the topic I wished to discuss, but it 
apparently also means that I have made up a few things, which I am fairly 
certain I had not.

  [I did make a mistake in which the afore-posted link was attributed to Mike 
Keesey, when in fact he was responding to it, where the original poster used 
the offending term; Mike responded later with a correction that "paraphyletic 
clade" was oxymoronic.  It may have at one point been taught by a biology 
professor, though -- http://people.rit.edu/rhrsbi/; I am not sure if this is 
current.  See, I'm even self-corrective.]

Cheers,

  Jaime A. Headden

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

"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the 
experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to 
do so." --- Douglas Adams (Last Chance to See)

"Ever since man first left his cave and met a stranger with a different 
language and a new way of looking at things, the human race has had a dream: to 
kill him, so we don't have to learn his language or his new way of looking at 
things." --- Zapp Brannigan (Beast With a Billion Backs)

                                          
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