crocodile tears

[B. J. Tindall]

Curtis Clark wrote

>It seems to me that scientific study is never theory-neutral: what we look
>for is shaped by what we expect to find. Systematists that claim to study
>nature in a theory-neutral fashion are in fact merely failing to recognize
>or acknowledge the theories they use.

I have been battling with this for some time now. It would seem that both
phenetic and cladistic methodology picked up on being "theory-free", but
then I seemed to have spent quite some time reading about the underlying
theory in order to understand how it works. I came to the conclusion that
what most people mean is not that it is "free of theory", but that the
minimum number of assumptions are being made, which is something different.
Brian Tindall


********************************************************************
* Dr.B.J.Tindall      E-MAIL bti at dsmz.de                           *
* DSMZ-Deutsche Sammlung von Mikroorganismen und Zellkulturen GmbH *
* Mascheroder Weg 1b, D-38124 Braunschweig, Germany                *
* Tel.: ++ 531 2616 0 (general)                                    *
* Tel.: ++ 531 2616 224 (direct)                                   *
* Fax:  ++ 531 2616 418                                            *
* Fax:  ++ 531 2616 491 (ISDN)                                     *
*                                                                  *
* Homepage: http://www.dsmz.de/index.html                          *
* E-MAIL: help at dsmz.de (general enquiries)                         *
*         sales at dsmz.de (sales)                                    *
********************************************************************