Re: Opisthocoelicaudia (was Re: Titanosaurids)

[Graydon <graydon@dsl.ca>]

On Wed, Jan 23, 2002 at 04:20:15PM -0500, Dinogeorge@aol.com sent:
> The big problem with cladistics is that there is no way to weight
> characters, so it becomes a phony one-character-one-vote situation.
> You can't equate a character that appears everywhere along the spine
> with a character that is a single small lump on a long bone. Cladistic
> analysis is not necessarily a democracy.

And why not?  Both characters can plausibly be interpreted as one gene =
one selection event of difference.

Not being able to weigh characters in cladistic analysis is a
_feature_, not a bug; it avoids trying to assign importance, when the
basis for the importance -- the genome -- isn't available.

This leaves some stuff unresolvable, but that is a trouble which will
always be with us.

-- 
graydon@dsl.ca   |  Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre,
                 |  mod sceal þe mare þe ure maegen lytlað.
                 |   -- Beorhtwold, "The Battle of Maldon"