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fredag 6 januari 2012

Is cladistics simple?

Cladists take a pride of keeping matters simple, but take a look at their definitions of "clade" and "cladistics" on Wikipedia. Do these definitions (and the discussions about them)  keep matters simple? To me, they appear as the ultimate confusion of all concepts at the same time... Keeping matters simple in comprehension is obviously the opposite to keeping matters simple in words. The only thing cladists appeas to agree about is that all of them are right (to keep it simple), for what it is worth on a practical level discussing reality...

(Isn't this a fairly simple description of cladistics?)

I can explain cladistics simple by that it is "confusion of object and class, and thereby confusion of conceptualization itself". I can thus also explain simple that the problems cladists have to explain their confusion is due to that it is a confusion, that is, that they try to explain a confusion. I can thus explain simple that cladistics is incomprehensible because it is incomprehensible. The only reason that cladists think that cladistics is comprehensible is that they do not understand that they confuse object and class. They simply do not understand what they are doing.  

onsdag 28 september 2011

On the problem with the concepts monophyletic group and clade

The problem with the concept monophyletic group is that it is ambiguous between specifics (i.e., in time) and generics (i.e., over time) - whereof the concept specific monophyletic group is synonymous with what cladists call paraphyletic group, and generic monophyletic group is synonymous with holophyletic group. This conceptual ambiguity means that specific and generic monophyletic groups can't be practically distinguished unambiguously, because an ambiguity can't be distinguished unambiguously.

The problem with the concept clade is that it confuses the concept monophyletic group with holophyletic group, and thus also generic with specific. It means that clades can't be practically distinguished without contradiction, because generic is orthogonal (i.e., diametrically opposed) to specific.