[Taxacom] sloppy cladistic analyses

[John Grehan]

Not sure. In the recent hominid analysis I treated all potential
synapomorphies equally. On the other hand, I limited the data to only
putative synapomorphies so is that weighting?

John Grehan


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stephen Thorpe [mailto:s.thorpe at auckland.ac.nz]
> Sent: Wednesday, February 03, 2010 10:12 PM
> To: John Grehan; Taxacom
> Subject: RE: [Taxacom] sloppy cladistic analyses
> 
> I think Grehan is talking about character weighting, in essence .. are
you
> John, my friend?
> 
> ________________________________________
> From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu [taxacom-
> bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of John Grehan
> [jgrehan at sciencebuff.org]
> Sent: Thursday, 4 February 2010 3:56 p.m.
> To: Taxacom
> Subject: Re: [Taxacom] sloppy cladistic analyses
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
> [mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Jason Mate
> 
> 
> "...'law of large numbers' that overrules the 'law of shared derived
> characters'..." They are not laws, they are more like guidelines...
> Seriously, the old quality versus quantity?
> 
> In a way yes. The 'law of large numbers' characterizes the
perspectives
> of many systematists, particularly molecularists, but also many
> morphologists, that large numbers of characters somehow gives one more
> likelihood of the right answer. I coined the 'law of shared derived
> characters' a bit facetiously as a contrast in that its not a matter
of
> simply having a 'lot' of characters but having informative characters.
> 
> John Grehan
> 
> _______________________________________________
> 
> Taxacom Mailing List
> Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
> http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom
> 
> The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either of
> these methods:
> 
> (1) http://taxacom.markmail.org
> 
> Or (2) a Google search specified as:
> site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/taxacom  your search terms here