parsimony/biology

[Curtis Clark]

At 09:07 PM 2/26/01, Kirk Fitzhugh wrote:
>The difficulty here is that "phylogeny" is not a "pattern." One does not go
>out and observe a cladogram. All that are observed are individuals, i.e.,
>individual organisms. The patterns one can perceive are the properties
>shared among some individuals. A "phylogeny," or a cladogram, is a
>statement of a series of causal *events*, not a statement of the existence
>of a "thing."

I haven't been following this thread closely, but this statement lept out.
Those individual organisms are not things, they are statements of causal
events of ontogeny, or at a more basic level, of particle physics. And yet
we are not forced to deal with them that way. Anything can be a pattern, at
one level of analysis. Whether that sort of analysis is useful is another
matter, but I don't see any reason to reject it as illogical.

--
Curtis Clark                  http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
Biological Sciences Department             Voice: (909) 869-4062
California State Polytechnic University      FAX: (909) 869-4078
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