Cladomaleosauria (was: Understanding evolution problems)

[pierre deleporte]

Hi Ken,

with permission, may I suggest that, from a purely statistical point of 
view, and as far as I know, you are yourself just a male (100%), which 
should make your opinion highly doubtful, according to your own criteria... 
beware of yourself!  :-).

More seriously : I wonder whether the quite fashionable "feminist" way of 
looking at science has any scientific basis at all (where are the serious 
demonstrations of a sex bias in scientific reasoning? I don't mean access 
to tenures).
I myself attended meetings of "the" society of cladists (WHS) where females 
got all the student prizes. A clear demonstration that all influent 
participants were certainly not males.

Besides this, you can effectively appeal to some "classic" cladists against 
phylocode (e.g. some of them just argued warmly against phylocode in the 
recently issued bulletin of the French Systematics Society), but you 
certainly cannot appeal to them in favor of paraphyly. One problem is that, 
in your personal jargon, "strict cladists" is used to qualify both 
phylocoders and proponents of strict monophyly. But systematicians in the 
real world appear to be more diverse (and their views more changing) than 
you seem to believe. A classification of classifiers is not that simple.

Cheers,
Pierre
male 100%, hence maybe you should forget this post...
And did you ever check the ratio on TAXACOM ?
Maybe this whole list is irremediably phallocratic after all... scaring, 
isn't it?   ;-).

A 10:28 16/03/2004 -0600, you wrote :
>Curtis,
>      Well, I was talking about "strict cladists", not the wider group of 
> systematists who use cladistic analysis (of which I am myself a 
> member).  But if you want some hard evidence of what I am talking about, 
> I would suggest looking at the last version of the PhyloCode (Sept. 
> 2003).  Note that both primary authors are male (100%) and of the 26 
> members of the Advisory Group, 25 are males (over 96%).
>           --------- Ken Kinman
>*********************************************************
>At 20:08 2004-03-08, Ken Kinman wrote:
> >(ever notice that most are male?)
>As a matter of fact, no. I'd like to see some evidence that the M/F ratio 
>among cladists is significantly different from that of systematists as a whole.
>--
>Curtis Clark

Pierre Deleporte
CNRS UMR 6552 - Station Biologique de Paimpont
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