Re: Cladobabble

[Josh Smith <smithjb@sas.upenn.edu>]

christopher brochu wrote:

> Josh:

> >There are people that love cladistics and there are people who hate it,
> >but with a
> >very few exceptions, no one is working in improving it.

    Chris:

> I agreed with everything Josh said up to this statement.  Every issue of
> _Systematic Biology_ and _Cladistics_ has at least one article improving
> phylogenetic methodology (or at least claiming to do so); most of the
> improvements with parsimony are in _Cladistics_, but not all of them.  In
> fact, one of the most fundamental improvements to parsimony analysis (the
> ratchet method for obtaining the complete set of MPT's) came about within
> the past couple of years.

Josh:

    Damn...right.  I wasn't explicit enough I don't think.  However, I WAS,
perhaps mistakenly, under the impression that most of these sorts of articles
involve working with missing data problems or new ways of coding them or new
algorithms or such, not with the description or selection of characters.

Chris:

>
> As for the problem of inexplicit character definitions - the only real
> solution there is to have reviewers flag problems in submitted matrices.
> And before someone cries out about the time necessary to do this, and how
> no one really does it - in non-dinosaurian circles, this is standard
> operating procedure.  My characters went through several cycles of review.
> I know this is a dinosaur list, but phylogenetics is phylogenetics.
>
> Another solution is to have each and every character figured in the text.

Josh:

    The only problem I can see with this is that the characters then become a
consensus between the author and whomever ends up reviewing the paper and it is
still a bit subjective, although perhaps that is the best we can do.  Chris
might be right in that this is the only way to solve or improve this situation,
but I am not 100% convinced yet.  Hmmm...I wonder...

>
> Chris:
> Among dinosaur workers, perhaps.  Outside Dinosauria, no - this is a real
> issue, and people certainly deal with it.  Go to the evolution/systematics
> meeting sometime, and you'll see all kinds of people dealing with it in all
> kinds of ways (some more violently than others).
>

Josh:
    This is a dinosaur list. People tend to get flamed for talking about stuff
to far away from the Dinosauria here...


--
Josh Smith
Department of Earth and Environmental Science
University of Pennsylvania
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