RE: Russia and phylogenetics was Re: Ceratonykus braincase described

[Mickey Mortimer <mickey_mortimer111@msn.com>]

David Marjanovic wrote-

> > With Babelfish and the availability of publications online, I can
> > only see poverty entering into it if they're too poor to afford the
> > internet.
>
> You way overestimate Babelfish (and translate.google.com).
>
> And Internet access is one thing, but paywalls are another. The French
> National Museum of Natural History doesn't give its employees online
> access to Nature, Science, or the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology...
> the University of Vienna does subscribe to Nature and Science online,
> but stopped carrying the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences in 2000 and
> has never subscribed to the JSP...

In regard to translation, perfect Russian versions aren't necessary for the 
kinds of issues Ivakhnenko et al. are outdated on.  Surely they note everyone 
else is using character matrices to generate cladograms, and that no one else 
uses their taxonomy.  In regard to paywalls, many papers are free and many more 
are available by asking authors.  Even without English, a Babelfish-mangled pdf 
request would be legible.  There's enough information out there and 
interpretable without English that poverty can't be an excuse.  Just look at 
Kurochkin's or Alifanov's bibliographies- they have all the new papers.  I'm 
thinking something more along the line of national pride and/or a conservatism 
that sees the rest of the world as misled.

Mickey Mortimer