cladistics

[StephanPickering@cs.com]

       A response to philidor11: Please, do not stop adding to the discussions re:cladistics and scientific "discourse" often being, in the main, a paradigm of social activities. I refer you, specificially, to the work of: Donna Haraway, Evelyn Fox Keller, Brian Noble, among others. My own methodology, in my in-progress book Alfred Russel Wallace's KING KONG, is to note that paleontology, since Roy Chapman Andrews's Indiana Jonesian escapes, has been relatively masculinist. The early history of our "field" (I have devoted my life since 1954 to studying dinosaurs, so "field" may not be an adequate adjective...adverb?) was intertwined with colonialist/racialist/gendered expansions: the virulent racialism of H.F. Osborn and E.D. Cope (in "ornithology", it was Robert Shufeldt who came closest to being a proto-nazi) has been replaced by gendered perspectiv!
es!
!
. Paleontology is a social construct, regardless of the protestations of some, like W.J. Mitchell, who would conflate societal icons with scientific "objects". I agree with Mr Mitchell that dinosaurs-qua-dinosaurs are intersections of "culture"/"nature" determinants, but, often, we need to remember that "woman" does not equal "gender", and that "woman" has biological and social meanings, i.e., "female". Females are not the only zoological taxa to be marked by "gender"; as Donna Haraway has written, "gender is a concept developed to contest the naturalization of sex". Thus, we should be concerned with women in paleontology, the science of gender, and gender in paleontology (I am here speaking of developmental paleo/biology). Thus we have a nexus: <paleontology + men + dinosaurs + Horrorwood + spectacle>. And yet. Does this mean adequate funding for cladistic analyses? Are there gender biases (heterosexist or homosexist) in cladistics itself? Does the spectaclization of !
d!
!
inosaur studies mean there is money available for the underrated aspects of nondinosaur paleontology? How many paleontologists consider, e.g., the pioneering research of Londa Schiebinger? Or: the K/T event was more than what many realize: a conflagration impacting all planetary taxa, viz. breeding biologies etc. were altered for surviving dinosaurs.