Re: Dodson article

["philidor11" <philidor11@snet.net>]

<...In Dodson's words, cladistics merely "confirms the obvious."  He puts
forward the Ceratopsia as an example: his own morphometric analysis of
phenetic data generated a tree that is remarkable congruent with a phylogeny
obtained by cladistic analysis.  Dodson phrases this as an objection to
cladistic analysis.  Other paleontologists might interpret this comparison a
little differently.  A
cladistic analysis might be seen as a more rigorous way of achieving the
same goal - sifting out the primitive and convergent characters from the
useful (shared derived) ones, which are used for constructing a phylogeny.>

When he said 'confirms the obvious', did you take his objection as meaning
that cladistic analysis
--responds to what seems obvious to the analyst,
--finds decisive results only when the relationship is so apparent that no
alternative is possible,
--or uses a mechanism so (falsely) limited that only one explanation could
possibly be produced?
The fact that he could generate a similar tree by a different method seems
most applicable to the first two objections, but your quote of his comments
elsewhere in your post might tie his statement to the third objection.
Did he say how he avoided the first problem (influence of expectation) in
his own analysis?  Too bad there isn't any way to do a double blind test
with a fossil.
Also, notice that the second objection assumes Dodson's (or another
critic's) own view that only one answer is possible.  Is there any chance at
all of convergence within the ceratopsia?  If so, then 'obvious' = by far
the most reasonable expectation, as opposed to necessarily true.
Thanks for your comments; I definitely enjoyed thinking about them!