[Taxacom] What are accurate phylogenies?

[Richard Petit]

Sitting down here in the real world looking up at the ivory towers, the view 
is often fuzzy. As much as I enjoy reading the bickering that goes on in 
this forum I often feel like a beer drinker at a wine tasters' convention. 
The terms used describing wines are no less subjective that many used here. 
Anyway, on the subject of the oxymoron "accurate estimates," I consider 
cladistics and other subjective methods to be much like our old way of 
weighing pigs.

My family was poor and we raised/grew most of our own food. We also raised a 
few pigs to sell every year. To be sure we were not cheated when we sold 
them, we needed to know their weight. Not being able to afford scales we 
would get a log, balance a board across it, and place a box on each end of 
the board. We would put a pig in one box, and then put rocks in the other 
box until it balanced. When it balanced, we would then guess how much the 
rocks weighed.

Respectfully (really),

dick p.