Re: _Night Comes to the Cretaceous_

[tlford@ix.netcom.com]

Jonathon Woolf wrote:
> 
> 
> Illogical.  The extinction was selective: all nonavian dinosaurs, but no
> birds; 

Ehhhh, wrong. All Enantiornithes went extinct.

mammals hurt but not wiped out; cold-water organisms less
> affected than tropical ones; marine reptiles more heavily hit than fish;
> etc.  

> Regarding your other statement:
> 
> > It hasn't escaped my notice that some of the same people who go after strict
> > and rigid numerical parsimony in cladograms with a vengeance also happily
> > concoct the most complicated, unparsimonious explanations for the K-T mass
> > extinction, when the most parsimonious explanation has been available for 
> > more
> > than two decades.
> 
> The Law of Parsimony says that the simplest explanation which covers
> _all_ the facts is preferable over more complicated explanations.  The
> impact scenario is not parsimonious as long as it fails to explain all
> the facts.
> 
> And it hasn't escaped my notice that certain people have a habit of
> ASSuming that if I object to some aspects of a certain methodology or
> hypothesis, I object to the whole thing.
> 
That could be because you don't express yourself in a way that others
understand.

Tracy