Re: Gaia theropod follow-up: a "new" phylogeny

[Dinogeorge@aol.com]

In a message dated 10/10/00 0:01:31 AM EST, jeffmartz@earthlink.net writes:

<< Do you think that historians and nuclear physicists and chemists and
 astronomers and members of every other field of study that has to infer
 about its subject without observing it directly are running a fools errand?
 I've never seen a sample of methane gas from Jupiter, but I'm willing to
 trust atronomer's means of inferring its presence indirectly. >>

Sorry, but cladistic analysis is not at all as reliable as spectroscopic 
analysis! If it were, I'd be a cladist right now. You can take any 
appropriate telescope, attach any appropriate spectroscope to it, observe 
Jupiter on any day of the year it's visible, and find the methane signal in 
its spectrum. This is emphatically not the situation with cladistic analysis, 
where the addition of a few new characters and taxa can give you a whole new 
phylogeny. It's like looking at Jupiter with the same instruments one day and 
seeing nothing but methane, and on another day seeing nothing but propane. 
Which observation is correct?