corroboration

[Richard Jensen]

Doug Yanega wrote:

> As I have always understood it, the tree is NOT the hypothesis being tested
> in cladistics. Each set of character states is a separate hypothesis of
> homology. When one performs a cladistic analysis, all of the hypotheses of
> homology are compared to one another simultaneously, and the most
> parsimonious tree is the resulting hierarchy which results in the smallest
> total number of rejected hypotheses. Trees are not falsifiable nor
> corroborated in any sense, only the individual hypotheses of homology upon
> which the tree is based, and they are only rejected *in* the context of
> constructing the tree, not *after* the tree is constructed. In this sense,
> your argument about corroboration appears to be a red herring. At the
> least, one cannot assign probabilities of being right or wrong to these
> individual hypotheses either before or after the analysis.

 I seem to recall that compatibility analysis *can* be used to evaulate
probabilities; i.e., the probability that these characters support the same tree.

Meacham wrote several papers on this in the 80's, but I don't have the references
at hand.

Richard Jensen
Department of Biology
Saint Mary's College
Notre Dame, IN  46556