[Taxacom] Why character-tracking doesn't happen?

[Curtis Clark]

On 2008-09-14 20:08, Don.Colless at csiro.au wrote:
> For once I find myself agreement with our resident gadfly. Homoplasy
> is a NAME that we give to a set of phenomena that happen to have a
> similar result - viz. parallelism, convergence, and reversal. Each
> has its own explanation.

Homoplasy is false homology. It's a mistake. As I used to tell students, 
if I mistakenly thought the trunk of an elephant and the trunk of an oak 
tree were homologous, to me that would be homoplasy, but the students 
might regard it as stupidity.

-- 
Curtis Clark                  http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
Director, I&IT Web Development                   +1 909 979 6371
University Web Coordinator, Cal Poly Pomona