parsimony/biology

[Curtis Clark]

At 09:06 AM 2/27/01, Kirk Fitzhugh wrote:
>Wow, individual organism cannot be regarded as things?

Good lord, don't you read? "And yet we are not forced to deal with them
that way." And you'd be pretty embarrassed if you met me at a meeting and I
only had one eye (thankfully, I still have two).

>True, anything can be a pattern. But
>do you really want to reduce cladograms to being nothing more than patterns
>of intersecting lines?

Uh, a pattern of shared homologies, perhaps? I guess I don't understand why
the word "pattern" has you upset--it's not as if the pattern cladists had a
lock on the word. Pattern recognition is the first step in many branches of
science, something one does before looking for causality.

As I mentioned, I haven't been following this thread closely, and if what I
take as nonsense at face value actually has meaning in the context of the
discussion, my apologies for intruding.


--
Curtis Clark                  http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
Biological Sciences Department             Voice: (909) 869-4062
California State Polytechnic University      FAX: (909) 869-4078
Pomona CA 91768-4032  USA                  jcclark at csupomona.edu