[Taxacom] was contamination

[Jason Mate]

Sorry for not replying sooner but duty called.

Yes I am familiar with Camin, Sokal and Sneath´s game.  Their experience seemed rather like an experiment on how humans perceive or understand evolution (both from Camin´s perspective and the students who did the reconstruction) so it is no surprise that parsimony worked: keeping it simple was more likely to get yo closer to the correct result, or at least not as far astray. As for comparing both datasets on a new phylogeny of caminalcules, well the major issue would be generating a realistic model for the evolution of morphological characters to compare with the molecular ones. To my knowledge there are no studies that try to quantify variables such as rates, probabilities and such on morphology in toto. Could be fun though.

Best

Jason

> Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2011 16:14:09 -0700
> To: TAXACOM at MAILMAN.NHM.KU.EDU
> From: dyanega at ucr.edu
> Subject: Re: [Taxacom] was contamination
> 
> 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
> 
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