RE: Philidor: No Class

["Jaime A. Headden" <qilongia@yahoo.com>]

Philidor (philidor11@snet.net) wrote:

<Whatever the virtues of PAUP, etc., we're better off for the presence of
someone like HP Holtz, and I'll extend that to HP Mortimer. I'll also give
the credit for insightful analysis to HP Holtz, and HP Mortimer, because
that's where it belongs.>

  Though not as if this devalues their work, and indeed Tom Holtz has said
this himself, the work of these fellows is in fact PAUP-run analyses
(though Holtz also uses Maclade to study character transformation...).
Holtz has also indicated that any systematic analysis, no matter what is
used, is a work-in-progress. How you use and interpret this
work-in-progress, if even to consider it an end-all analysis, is up to
you, or the analyst.

  Also, do not forget the work of Xu Xing or Mark Norell, Paul Upchurch or
Pete Makovicky, Scott Sampson or Jeff Wilson, Cathy Forster or Paul
Sereno, or Chris Brochu, who have recently done bang-up jobs on
large-scale analyses of large-level groups, not all of them dinosaurs --
and certainly not all theropods -- as well as soon-to-be-published works
by Rauhut and Chure. Plus, a systematic analysis does not need to be
cladisitic in nature, either. Anyways, my piece is done...

  Cheers,

=====
Jaime A. Headden

  Little steps are often the hardest to take.  We are too used to making leaps 
in the face of adversity, that a simple skip is so hard to do.  We should all 
learn to walk soft, walk small, see the world around us rather than zoom by it.

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