One of the things about having one's own blog is that one gets to say what sorts of behaviours are acceptable by commenters. My commenters are generally a pretty nice bunch of people, often clever (hey, they read me) and polite even as the issues get hot. Occasionally, one is not. When this happens, the commenter gets warned, and if they really don't get it, banned. For the first time this has happened. Even odder, it's not a creationist, but a fanatic of another stripe: Mats Enval, the anticladist. Enval's modus operandi consisted of making assertions about how illogical cladism, or anything else that happened to catch his eye, was. No argument, just assertion. As he started to invade long-static threads, I decided I have had enough. He's gone. Any gaps in the comments are explained.
Thanks to everyone else for behaving within my rather loose requirements. I don't think I'm unreasonably strict.
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Does this mean Mornington Crescent is OK? :-)
And here was I thinking that this had something to do with the Mars landing; along the lines of how NASA should interact in their first contact with the Martians.
The very first person to play Mornington Crescent will be, ummm, sent to Coventry...
Coventry? That isn't on the map, unless you play the Coventry rules (and as anyone knows they don't know what they do). For that you just got stuck in Waterloo until either Westminster goes into recess or London bridge closes.
I'm never going to understand these rules. ;-)
I have no idea what anticladism is, but it sure sounds like something from a Monty Python sketch. Expunge the anticladists!
Your banning didn't last long, did it? Looks like someone is nymshifting.
We'll see who gets sick of this first.
I don't think you're unreasonably strict. You let me post here!
I'm not sure how Mr. Enval thinks that spamming your old threads will help his case. Do you have some power inside the inner sanctum of "BIG SCIENCE" to influence the acceptance of his ideas?
The Mars mission is so exciting. All the Mars missions are fascinating. Did anyone else watch the TV coverage yesterday, even though there was no actual video of the landing? If I could start over again, I would definitely be a Rocket Scientist. One of the mission specialists, it may have been the project manager, was asked about the landing sequence. When he got to the part where the parachute has separated and the landing engines have kicked in, he explained what would happen if one of the twelve engines failed, "The other eleven would take it down to the crash site."
I watched the landing on NASA TV. It was cool as hell. Almost felt the way I used to watching Apollo missions (I was the one guy in Australia still watching at 2am for Apollo 17).
I missed that comment. Funny as hell.
The only annoying thing is that I was looking forward to your explanation of the problems with Ashlock's distinction between monophyly and holophyly. Now I'm guessing it's probably been taken off the priority list.
For the moment, yes.
Vodka and commenting don't mix.
John, I hope you can find some time to comment on the Envall paper before long. I was pretty familiar with the arguments 20 years ago when I was working on my dissertation, but I found his paper almost incomprehensible. If one is going to comment on trees, then I would suggest some figures are required. I always thought Mayr's problem was he hated his beloved birds being lumped with crocodiles - by virtue of crocodiles being more closely related to birds than to other reptilomorph groups.
Michael, I'm up to 47 pieces of spam from Envall now. I will never review his paper or discuss that issue so long as he continues to do this. As it turns out, he's only a teacher's aide.
John,
Fair enough - I will reread Ashlock - I'm sure I can dig it out of a stack of reprints somewhere in my office. I will also try to convert his written text into figures to see if I can make sense of this. Perhaps it is not worth the effort...
My vague memory of this centered on the incongruence of the linnaean classification with phylogenetic trees - the loss of information in translating a tree into a linnaean scheme.
I went back and reread Peter Ashlock's 1979 paper. All he says is that we should classify organisms not on the basis of relationship, but on relationship plus similarity. Relationship can be objectively defined, but similarity cannot. He mentions an unpublished paper with Denis Brothers that he suggests will objectify similarity/difference to determine classification, but I can find no evidence for it ever being published. I can't see that anything can be gained by including similarity in a classification.
Here is how Ashlock defines "Reptiles": "...those vertebrates with amniote eggs whose species lack mammary glands and feathers."
Anything with feathers is not a reptile, but an amniote with feathers is not necessarily a bird. In the linnaean system they would be.....
Give me a tree anyday.
Michael I agree with you, but please don't feed the troll.
And can you send me the citation for that paper? Thanks
John,
I am sorry about engaging with said troll - I was only trying to remember why I had found Ashlock and Mayr's argument without merit 20 years ago. The troll kept butting in to my thought process. He does appear slightly unhinged.
The article is in a volume devoted to Hennig of Systematic Zoology:
An Evolutionary Systematist's View of Classification. Peter D. Ashlock.
Systematic Zoology, Vol. 28, No. 4, 441-450. Dec., 1979.