Dicyema japonicum
1 week ago
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Cladistics Post Deleted
A recent Dechronization post related to OSU's Workshop in Phylogenetics has been deleted. This post was intended as a inside joke for the small readership of this blog, but was inappropriate and unprofessional in this context and for a public forum of this nature. If you were affected by this post and would prefer to have some of the content reposted in this forum we would be happy to accomodate you.
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11 comments:
Google Reader never forgets!
I first offer my sincere apologies to Dr. Goloboff and anyone else who may have taken offense to what I wrote. “Unethical” regardless of the modifier, was absolutely a poor (and incorrect) choice of words. I thank Dr. Goloboff for clarifying the situation; obviously, I had incomplete data as my comments were made from my three-year old recollections of the meeting and conversations with its participants. That I shared these recollections without either attempting to find out the full story, or privately offering Dr. Goloboff a chance to respond, was a poor decision on my part, and indeed unfair to Dr. Goloboff.
We certainly have philosophical disagreements, but let me be completely unambiguous and state the following: I have no doubts that any of those systematists with whom I disagree (in print, or otherwise) are ethical scientists.
I also apologize to the Dechron blog organizers and its readers for not treating this as a public scientific forum with a high standard of ethics.
Google Cache also does not forget.
Not so fast, Matt! Which one of them paid you to bring all this traffic to the blog, and how much did it cost? If it's reasonable, I may have you stir up some controversy on the ENMTools blog.
Sigh, silly science bloggers, welcome to the Streisand effect.
We realize, of course, that this post and the associated comments will never disappear entirely. This is why we're doing what we can to ensure that another side of the story is available to interested parties.
Here is Pablo Goloboff again. Just a note to publicly accept the apologies from Matt Brandley; there were also apologies from, I believe, "Glor", which I didn't have time to accept before that other post was deleted --I accept those apologies now.
--Pablo Goloboff
Thanks to Dr. Brandley and Dr. Goloboff for clearing the air.
How do we know that the anonymous above is Goloboff or not? I might be him right?
At least one author of this blog and the person who made the comment related to Dr. Goloboff have been in touch with him directly. These discussions confirm the authenticity of his post.
Hi all,
Brent Mishler here. At the risk of stirring up the ashes of this controversy, I just wanted to add an observation as someone who hangs around both with "cladists" and "Bayesianists". I am sitting at the Hennig meeting in Singapore right now, and it has been an amazing set of talks on a wide diversity of organisms from viruses to mosses to flies, topics ranging from biological inventories, comparative genomics, biogeography, ecology, conservation, etc., and the complete range of phylogenetic methods from NJ to MP to ML to Bayesian (we just had a talk using BEAST as I write), Heavy-duty intellectual discussion after each talk (the tradition at Hennig meeting is no limits of discussion). No brow-beating or abuse, just frank discussion of issues.
I have to say that the intellectual and methodological diversity, and across-the-board critical thinking, at this meeting is far greater than that at similar-sized gatherings of self-satisfied Bayesianists I have attended. I highly recommend that everyone attend a future Hennig meeting and see for yourselves.
Keep in mind that Hennigian "cladistics" is not synonymous with parsimony. It refers to a whole range of ideas relevant to character-based analysis of branching systems. It is also a set of now widely-accepted classification ideas including monophyly. In terms of intellectual traditions descending in large part from Hennig, all of the readers of this blog are "cladistists" (I prefer "phylogeneticists").
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