Homology & word-"baiting"

[Curtis Clark]

At 07:07 PM 5/16/2003 +0000, Ken Kinman wrote:
>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.

When your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

Calling parallelism homology is in fact a human failure, because homologies
convey specific information that parallelism does not (even Mayr agrees
with this). That's not the same thing as dismissing parallelism or lumping
it with convergence. I find parallelism immensely interesting. I resist
using it, however, to diagnose clades.

>      Even worse is the branding of ALL paraphyletic taxa as "human
>failures".

Gosh, it seems that *I* must be *your* straw man, for all your anger
against "strict cladists". If you're going to get all hot under the collar,
I wish you would learn to aim a bit more precisely.

>     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.

I don't see how my definitions of homology, parallelism, and convergence
are at all "cladistic", much less elitist (I learned them first from Mayr
and Simpson), and although the definitions I use for apomorphy and
plesiomorphy are explicitly cladistic, they are in no way explicity
"anti-paraphyly"; in fact, without the distinction of apomorphy and
plesiomorphy, paraphyly and holophyly cannot be distingusihed, and all your
"eclectic" markers become moot.

>  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.

How are any of the definitions I use "stacked"?

>Discussing the concept of "fuzzy" species will
>probably help such students a lot more than just literature citations.

Many of us who teach for a living believe that it is better to teach a
student to fish that to hand the fishes to them.