Re: The mystery of the furcula

["Mickey_Mortimer11" <Mickey_Mortimer11@email.msn.com>]

I'll let Tim reply to most of this if he wants, but....

Tracy L. Ford wrote-

> >>I meant (and I think my post made this very clear) that I was referring
to
> the subjective culling of character sets.  In other words, "The
distribution
> of this character is screwing up my pre-conceived phylogeny.  So out it
> goes!"  E.g. George thinks that the furcula is of paramount importance in
> theropod phylogeny: but his cladograms are not telling him this, he is
> telling his cladograms.<<
>
> Not only George, but Holtz, Paul, Norrell, etc. I guess they're all wrong.

I doubt very much that Holtz or Norell do this (never seen a phylogenetic
analysis by Olshevsky or Paul).  It's usually pretty obvious when someone
does, by the character matrix being neatly divided into groups of characters
that define certain clades (ocassionally with ten or so characters at the
end that were considered "homoplasic"), with extremely high consistancy
indices (.9 +).  I really hate it when people make "analyses" like this,
because they're not analyzing anything, just putting in a sequence of
characters that support groups they like to see and using the resultant
cladogram to represent their idea graphically.  I certainly don't do this,
as I put in pretty much every character I find (barring size-based things,
etc.), and I would hope other paleontologists would have the scientific
ethics not to either.

Mickey Mortimer