"uncompromising, single-minded"

[Don.Colless at CSIRO.AU]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Thomas Lammers [mailto:lammers at VAXA.CIS.UWOSH.EDU]
>
>
>
> The way to "resolve conflict among differing views" [i.e.,
> different classificatory products] is to remember they are
> hypotheses.  How do we discriminate among hypotheses?  Test
> them.  Examine a new class of data, e.g., gene sequences.
> Does this type of data support the current hypothesis or
> falsify it?  If the latter, cast a new hypothesis.
> Cladistics is just a way of creating (and I suppose testing)
> hypotheses.

It might be worth pointing out that precisely the same process - of
formulating and testing hypotheses - can be attrributed to phenetics. There,
the ultimate criteria are stability, utility, informativeness, etc. of a
classification; but, curiously, these often overlap with the phyletic
criterion! The ONLY problem there is that paraphyletic taxa are not ruled
out of hand.