With the rapid-fire replies of Harshman coming thick and fast,
there are quite a number of posts to which I have not replied
and others that I've made only tiny dents in. IIRC the
one to which I am now replying belongs to the latter category.
On Wednesday, November 18, 2015 at 10:49:09 AM UTC-5, John Harshman wrote:
> On 11/18/15 6:57 AM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > On Wednesday, November 18, 2015 at 1:04:12 AM UTC-5, John Harshman wrote:
> >> On 11/17/15 6:42 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> >>> On Tuesday, November 17, 2015 at 8:49:13 PM UTC-5, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> >>>> The long-running thread, "Did we come from monkeys?" has morphed into
> >>>> a comparison between the two systems of classification that have come
> >>>> down to us: the traditional ("Linnean") and the cladistic ("phylogenetic").
> >>>>
> >>>> I thought it a good idea to present, first, a "primer" on what these
> >>>> two systems are, and then to get down to the nitty-gritty of their
> >>>> largely complementary nature.
> >>>
> >>> The Linnean system's great strength lies in the way it classifies all
> >>> organisms, both extant and extinct, in a nested hierarchy starting
> >>> with the species, and then in ever-expanding circles we have its
> >>> genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom, and domain. [There are
> >>> intermediate ranks, like subfamily, superfamily, infraclass, subclass,
> >>> etc.] To keep things simple, I will confine myself mainly to animals
> >>> and indeed to vertebrates.
> >>
> >> So far, so good. Except that the Linnean system could be cladistic,
> >
> > Not without becoming a weak version of the phylogenetic.
>
> Again, the point of the Linnean system is ranks. Ranked taxa could be
> clades as easily as not.
A very ignorant comment. I challenged it a while back, and your reply to
the challenge was amusingly clueless.
But maybe that comment of yours was enough to shout down the opposition in
the Cladist Wars.
I hope to be able to find that post and show you today how clueless you were,
today, but family preparations for Thanksgiving severely limit my
time today, and Thanksgiving vacation begins for my family tomorrow.
So it may be only next Monday that I can get around to this.
> >> as I mentioned before, and that nested hierarchy is not a difference between
> >> systems.
> >
> > Its sheer existence is not, but the two take on radically different shapes.
> > See below where I quote what I wrote in reply to Richard Norman.
>
> You are confusing, again, ranked groups with attempts to represent
> overall similarity.
Stop dragging phenetics [sp?] into this discussion. Romer wouldn't
have given "overall similarity" the time of day.
> >> So that great strength isn't in fact a point of difference.
> >
> > That's like saying,
> >
> > the concept of color is not a point of difference between black and white,
> > so the great strength of white over black isn't in fact a point of
> > difference.
> >
> > That great strength, by the way, comes from the way white can
> > be resolved into a spectrum of colors.
>
> I don't see the analogy here.
Too bad. Catering to your mental laziness here will have to wait
until next week.
> >>> Each rank comes with a rough measure of disparity -- the amount
> >>> of variation allowed between members of the same taxon. Two living members
> >>> of the family *Hominidae*, for instance, are less disparate from each
> >>> other than the two most disparate members of the old Linnean class
> >>> *Amphibia* were from each other -- or even than the two most disparate
> >>> living amphibians are from each other.
> >>
> >> Now this just isn't true. There is no rough measure of disparity worth
> >> considering.
> >
> > Yes, there is. Romer himself used some rough and ready rules of thumb
> > when he wrote,
> >
> > [Birds] are divided into many orders; but the differences, for
> > example, between a humming bird and an albatross are much less
> > than the differences between a seal and a cat, or between a
> > stegosaurus and a duck-billed dinosaur, forms which are commonly
> > placed in a single order. The different [bird] orders have,
> > in general, no more differences between them than exist between
> > families in other classes of vertebrates, and, anatomically,
> > generic differences are so slight that fossils are hard to place.
> > --_Vertebrate Paleontology_, 1945 ed., pp. 264-5
>
> So Romer is in fact saying that the traditional system is a bad way of
> representing disparity.
Ah, but the very fact that he could make such comparisons with such
confidence showed that there is a way to reform, if reform were needed.
With ornithologist systematists having a whole CLASS to play around in,
it was human nature to take full advantage of the scope this gave them,
without consulting mammalian specialists on the proper limits of
the concept of "family", etc. That doesn't mean such consultation would
not have been fruitful, IF enough people on both sides really cared.
But why rock the boat? Why spend any time on this theme when it is
of dubious value where "publish or perish" is concerned?
> And you use this in your defense?
With this unreflective dig, you continue to exemplify what I wrote
about you being a polemicist first, a propagandist second, and
a reasoner a distant third.
> >>> These rankings are never better than ballpark estimates of disparity,
> >>> but they are reasonably good for gauging e.g. how close we are to the
> >>> true ancestral species of a clade.
> >>
> >> It isn't even clear what that would mean.
> >
> > Too bad Romer isn't alive so you can take up the issue with him. But
> > Carroll is still alive, and if you wish, I can run this comment by
> > Romer by him and see whether he agrees with it.
>
> Sure. Don't I recall that Carroll converted to cladistic classification?
Do you recall anything RELEVANT about Carroll, whom you blasted
as being "grossly mistaken" about ungulate evolution when it
suited your agenda to do so?
> > But hey, you specialize in neornithine birds like the hummingbird
> > and the albatross; perhaps you can actually *reason* against what
> > Romer wrote instead of falling back on your polemical tricks. You
> > know, the tricks you used when I cited John Hawks, hominin paleontology
> > specialist, in support of the statement that we should not,
> > under present day circumstances, say "humans are apes" in everyday
> > conversation.
>
> No, I don't recall any tricks.
The trick was to give every biologist an equal vote in the matter with
"So far, you have one biologist on your side" or words to that effect.
Your 'how many paleontologists do you know' is part of the same
ochlocratic thinking, isn't it?
If the practicing paleontologists had been
represented in the Cladist Wars the way even tiny nations are
represented in the U.N., would their SPECIAL insight into the unworkability
of every animal having its own genus, family, order, etc. in *cladistic*
taxa of 300 million years (or even 50 million years) ago have been given
a serious hearing?
It was a trick also because of the way you keep belittling people like
Carroll and Van Valen as though you were a far greater biologist
than either of them was.
> You should stop with the accusations.
You fully deserve them, and many more that I've refrained from making.
Remainder deleted, to be replied to later (only some time next week,
I fear).
Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics