Stuart and Mark

[Ken Kinman]

Stuart and Mark,
      Mark makes a good point, but one readily countered by someone on the
cladistic side of the wall (a wall which I obviously would like to see torn
down).
      Stuart's last post clearly states some of the inherent flaws in the
naive claim that strictly cladistic classifications will stabilize, and that
all will be right with the world (but this is a pipe dream).
      Tom overgeneralizes that ALL pre-Hennigian
(post-Darwinian) work was overly ancestor-driven.  But many
workers were intuitively doing cladistic-type analysis long
before Hennig formalized it.  Unfortunately the pendulum
has swung to the other extreme of being overly sister-group
driven (so much so that some cladists actually believe sister groups are
real).
      I think it is time to swing that pendulum back to a more productive
moderate approach.  Strict cladists who view this as a step backward really
miss the point, and they have to stop throwing out the baby out with the
bathwater (forgive me for using that analogy again, but I find it useful).
                           -----Ken Kinman
--------------------------------------------------------
>From: MAGarland at AOL.COM
>Reply-To: MAGarland at AOL.COM
>To: TAXACOM at USOBI.ORG
>Subject: Ancestor-descendent relationships
>Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 11:04:08 EST
>
>TDibenedetto writes:
>
> > Ancestry is a very specific type of relationship; far
more specific
> >  than sister-group relationship. .... But a claim of
ancestry would entail
> >  the assertion that one species was transformed into
another. There is no
> >  pattern in character distributions which can
distinguish this type of
> >  relationship from more general sister-group
relationships. So we can
> >  speculate about ancestry, and we can find evidence to
disprove a claim of
> >  ancestry, but there is no type of evidence to indicate
such a relationship.
>
>It's interesting that you can determine
ancestor-descendent relationships of
>*characters.*  So why not lineages?
>
>Naively,
>
>Mark A. Garland
>Florida Department of Environmental Protection
>2600 Blair Stone Road, Mail Station 2500
>Tallahassee, Florida 32399
>U.S.A.
>mark.garland at dep.state.fl.us
>magarland at aol.com
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