Strange thoughts on PN - was Re: BAD vs. BADD

[Martin Baeker <martin.baeker@tu-bs.de>]

> Neither of these really seems to hold much water, at least to me.
> a) This statement is somewhat hypocritical. Going from what Holtz said
> earlier, Caudipteryx, Velociraptor, Microraptor, Archaeopteryx, and modern
> birds have more in common than Velociraptor, Tyrannosaurus, Apatosaurus,
> Parasaurolophus, Triceratops and Stegosaurus do. If birds can't be considered
> dinosaurs, then we might as well break up Dinosauria entirely.

But isn't it strange that, despite this list being frequented mostly
by stronge believers in PN + cladistics, it is still called the
"dinosaur mailing list", not the "non-avian dinosaur mailing list"?

And doesn't "The complete dinosaur"-book exclude birds almost
completely (so, according to PN, it excludes about 80-90% of
all dinosaurs and still calls itself "complete")

And isn't it strange that it seems none of the PN-adherents here has
a problem with the notion "non-avian dinosaur", but can argue against
how arbitrary it would be to separate dinosaurs from birds?

Don't get me wrong: I wholeheartedly agree that when discussing
evolution, we should restrict ourselves to monophyletic groups, but
there are other interesting topics to discuss where other groupings
may be helpful.

Thought experiment: A space-ship with a few humans gets lost in space.
Unknown to people on earth, it lands on the planet Cladistia, where
the astronauts multiply and evolve to a new race with 4 arms, 7
tentacles on their head and who-knows what. After 1000 years, they
come back to earth. So now, the standard concept of "humans" is not
allowed anymore according to PN - cladistically, we would say that one
of these "Cladistians" is closer to one of the humans on earth than
this is to one of its ancestors, more than 1000 years ago, despite the
fact that those look almost identical. So we need a new nomenclature,
we will have "homo sapiens" splitting into "homo cladistiensis" and
"home neosapiens" (or whatever). When we want to talk about standard
humans (those with 2 arms and no tentacles) from today and 1000 years
ago, we have to call them "non-cladistian humans". And to everyone
looking at human evolution, it would seem that 1000 years ago, an
important thing happened to them.

Strangely, if all Cladistians were instead wiped out before evolving,
earth nomenclature can stay as it was. So what the valid nomenclature
on earth is (where events were completely smooth and nothing important
happened at all in this thought experiment) somehow depends on events
happening light-years away.

Isn't this somehow strange?

Martin.
 

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