SCIENCE AND CLASSIFICATION

[Tetanurae@aol.com]

Ken Kinman wrote:
<<I certainly hope Jaime understands that I wasn't dismissing his views 
as being irrelevant.  I am simply pointing out that a purely cladistic 
approach is not the only scientific way to analyze problems of phylogeny.  I 
feel obligated to defend eclecticism against the charge that it is 
unscientific.>>

I am taking three science classes this semester and the topic of discussion on the first day was oddly enough "what is science?"  The answer that every class came to was "the application of the scientific method to problems."  Although that's circular, it basically means the application of observation, hypothesis, testing, falsification.

To test an hypothesis, especially your own hypothesis, you need to be objective about it.  Humans have trouble being objective however, which makes science hard.

Which brings us to classification schemes.  The one and only classificatory methodology that APPROACHES science is cladistics.  To paraphrase Rod Scheetz, it's the objective analysis of our subjective observations.

What Mr Kinman does however is look at cladograms, ignore the parts that he opines don't "feel right" as well as the objective support for them, and then places his revised clado-story into a just-so story of Linnean taxonomy.  What Mr Kinamn does is not in any way shape or form science or scientific, because it is not testable, and therefore, not falsifiable.

In fact the "Kinman System" is nothing more than cluttered up Linnean Taxonomy that plays lip service to objectivity, and introduces useless terms like holophyly (monophyly to everyone else on the planet) and plesia.

Pete Buchholz
Tetanurae@aol.com