[Taxacom] Order Campanulales (worth maintaining?)

[Richard Zander]

John Grehan is quite right about this. The marketplace of ideas relies
on weighing alternative theories. Repeat, theories. Not choice of a
belief system.

Phylogenetics uses the structuralist approach, with cladograms being
lemmas and classifications theorems, deductively mapped to the
cladograms. Thus, all non-monophyly must be due to convergence because
there are no allowable alternative theories that can be dealt with by
sister-group analysis.

Dick Jensen is also right that you can believe in evidence (i.e.
evidentiary empirical science) or choose to believe in APG II (i.e.
structuralist axiomatics).


I'm trying to get a paper published on structuralism in phylogenetics.
It is difficult. When reviewers are phylogeneticists, they go ape shit.
See 
http://www.mobot.org/plantscience/resbot/EvSy/SciMathPhylog.htm 
or
http://tinyurl.com/6e7woy4 
for an excerpt.
 
* * * * * * * * * * * * 
Richard H. Zander 
Missouri Botanical Garden, PO Box 299, St. Louis, MO 63166-0299 USA 
Web sites: http://www.mobot.org/plantscience/resbot/ and
http://www.mobot.org/plantscience/bfna/bfnamenu.htm
Modern Evolutionary Systematics Web site:
http://www.mobot.org/plantscience/resbot/21EvSy.htm


-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
[mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of John Grehan
Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2011 7:35 AM
To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Order Campanulales (worth maintaining?)

But that's the way it's always been in taxonomy, or probably anything
else for that matter. Preferences are made with respect to
interpretations of evidence. Where the evidence is unambiguous the
preference will likely be a consensus. Where the evidence has some level
of ambiguity there will not be a consensus, but likely two or more
preferences among groups involved. Sometimes the majority group does
indeed dominate. This is demonstrated extremely well in human origins
where the overwhelming majority prefer the molecular sequence evidence
rather than the morphogenetic evidence.

John Grehan