[Taxacom] was contamination

[Doug Yanega]

Jason Mate wrote:

>Human beings tend to be quite irrational in 
>terms of control or lack of and will strongly
>believe that their abilities are somehow 
>superior to ´´machines´´. As long as the methods
>and results are verifiable then it matters not.

I don't think we've ever put this idea to a 
proper test, however. It would not necessarily be 
very hard to do.

Are you familiar with "Caminalcules"? This was a 
group of 77 fictitious taxa (some fossil, some 
extant) for which only Joe Camin (initially) knew 
the one true phylogeny, and the exercise was to 
see if people could reconstruct this phylogeny 
using their morphology. It was, in that sense, an 
objective test of whatever or whoever tried to 
determine the tree. I would, however, be willing 
to bet that if someone constructed a new set of 
fictitious organisms that had morphology *and* 
genes, and modeled their evolution in a realistic 
fashion (including biogeography, paleontology, 
etc.), that the gene trees would not be congruent 
with the morphological trees - and farther from 
the true tree - largely because of the 
unfavorable signal to noise ratio. In other 
words, I think one could disprove the "more 
characters is always better" view using this 
approach, though I am unaware of anyone ever 
attempting this.

Peace,
-- 

Doug Yanega        Dept. of Entomology         Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314        skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
              http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82