Homology & word-"baiting"

[Ken Kinman]

Curtis,
     You responded:  "Homoplasy is false homology.  It is by definition a
measure of human failure."
      My point is that categorizing parallelisms as homoplastic "human
failures" is a waste of perfectly good information, and a whole truckload of
definitions won't change that.  Nor will strawmen arguments about tree
trunks and elephant trunks.
      Even worse is the branding of ALL paraphyletic taxa as "human
failures".  This has been the overriding message of strict cladism for over
3 decades:  If you recognize a paraphyletic taxon, you are wrong, you have
failed, and you just don't "understand".  Dumping paraphyly and polyphyly
together as non-holophyletic "no-no's" is even worse than dumping
parallelisms and convergences together as homoplastic "no-no's".   This ploy
(guilt by association) is often successful, but I don't like it one bit.
     I still view it as elitist rubbish that has been defended over the
years by retreating back into the definitions of strict cladism, many of
which were designed to eliminate the perceived "unnaturalness" of paraphyly.
  Thus, it's just circular argumentation, and most eclecticists gave up a
long time ago trying to counter these semantic games played with a stacked
deck of definitions and methodologies.
     As for students arguing that species aren't real, I would suggest
telling them that it is actually the boundaries that we try to impose upon
species that not real (especially when those boundaries involve the added
dimension of time).   Discussing the concept of "fuzzy" species will
probably help such students a lot more than just literature citations.
           -------- Ken

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