"uncompromising, single-minded"

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-----Original Message-----
From: Barry Roth [mailto:barry_roth at YAHOO.COM]
>The practice of "eclectism" ... apparently includes a willingness to recognize 
>paraphyletic groups and a spirit of compromise.  These are relatively loose guidelines...
>Without some additional criteria, such as "the better taxonomy is the one with fewer 
>paraphyletic groups," I don't see how such a system does much to resolve conflict among 
>differing views.

Yes, this is an important point, IMO. It should be stressed, that the practice of delimiting taxa is equally arbitrary in cladistic and eclectic taxonomies. Usually, the limits of taxa are placed at some 'significant novelty' where the 'significance' is more or less a matter of taste. In this respect, difference between paraphyletic and holophyletic taxa is of less importance, IMO.

As concerns hypothesis testing, it does not seem to me that adding data to clado/phenogram establishes a 'test' in the classic falsification concept. Incorporating new data sets are better treated as re-descriptions. Would be the cladogram construction treated as testing, there should be no homoplasies - any character conflict is by definition a falsification of the respective clade and we would come to unresolved patterns in most (if not all) cases.
Best regards!
Zdenek Skala
skala at incoma.cz