Re: Birds and pornography

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

Hi Tim!
We've kind of agreed to differ, with one exception.
The basics:
< As one list member is fond of pointing out, a
pigeon looks very different from [to] a snake.>
Yes, you can tell what a bird looks like, and it is not the same as a
reptile.  Keep classes.

< However, _Archaeopteryx_ "looks" strikingly similar to _Deinonychus_...>
True:  go far enough back into the ancestry to creatures never seen alive,
and you can find animals so like two groups that classification is
arbitrary.  So drop clades; why bother with them?  Classifying animals near
the base can be considered a pedantic exercise.
In Jefferson's wonderful phrasing, groups should be distinguishable at a
glance by a traveler on horseback.  He had real doubts about whether
skeletal information should be used in distinguishing groups, and I feel
sympathetic to his problem.

These contradictory conclusions aside, I can acknowledge your point, right
up until you make the assertion that any view different from your own must
be antiscientific because inherently based on obsolete notions of progress,
superiority and inferiority.

(<However, the concept of "Class" was retained as part of an undertow of
"progress" that permeated the concept of evolutionary change.  Birds got
their own "Class" because (like mammals) it was believed that they had
transcended the "lowly" grade of Reptilia.>)

If you want to argue in favor of basing classification on current, tentative
guesses rather than hard observations of extant animals, I will consider
anything you say respectfully.
Just please don't assert that the alternative is only wrong-headed
philosophical mush.  Doesn't seem very persuasive to me.