[Taxacom] Invisible evolution

[Thomas Lammers]

----- Original Message -----
From: Richard Jensen <rjensen at saintmarys.edu>

> I've never been convinced of the logic of this approach. I once discussed this with David Hull, whose reply suggested that he, too, found this puzzling.< 

This problem is a reflection of the key fatal flaw with cladistics: the fact that it's practitioners are more interested in cleaving to a priori assumptions and getting the method to come out right, rather than discovering what *really* happened.  (Or as Art Cronquist characterized it, the preference for an elegant minuet over an unbridled search for truth.)  The ancestral species MUST go extinct lest our a priori decision that paraphyly is unacceptable be compromised.

Tom Lammers