Testing hypotheses

[Michael Gochfeld]

James seems to have outlined a methodology for testing hypotheses about
relationships. 

When I was at the AMNH the battle lines were clearly drawn between the
cladists and the "others", and at all the systematics discussions, one
side or the other would be sure to mount an attack reflecting their
particular dogma.  I was never impressed with the cladist arguments
(that didn't happen to be MY DOGMA), which seemed to make assumptions
about the universality of dichotomous speciation, but I was impressed
that the phylogenetic trees offered "hypotheses" to clarify thinking
about attributes, even though the attempt to find shared-derived
characters seemed bewildering.  

Mike Gochfeld

"Kondla, Norbert FOR:EX" wrote:
> 
> An excellent and objective approach. I like it :-)
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: James Kruse [mailto:fnjjk1 at uaf.edu]
> Sent: Monday, March 04, 2002 10:38 AM
> To: 'lepstalk'
> Subject: Re: [leps-talk] species and allopatry
> 
> Kondla, Norbert FOR:EX [mailto:Norbert.Kondla at gems3.gov.bc.ca] wrote:
> 
> > In the spirit of friendly debate and just plain perspective-sharing;
> > herewith my further comments on a couple of points James raises. The null
> > hypothesis as I understand it is applicable in situations where an idea or
> > concept can be tested by experimentation and where inductive or
> inferential
> > statistics are used. So I guess one could do some experimentation by
> taking
> > widely allopatric organisms and encouraging them to mate in a laboratory
> > setting;
> 
> Some clarifications and further comment:
> 
> 1. That's not what I was referring to when I mentioned having some sort of a
> null hypothesis about your taxonomic units. When I start a study, I strip
> the names and localities away and assign numbers. My null hypothesis, and I
> could use the opposite, is that they are all the same thing. I then screen
> for morphological characters, work up the mtDNA, and create data matrices on
> which certain statistical analyses may be conducted. The identities of the
> individuals are not given back until this phase of the study is over. Others
> have similar methodologies, and it seems to work pretty well. Re-associating
> the names with the numbers after the analyses is an exciting event for me.
> 
> 2. "Proof" is (considered by me to be) morphological or molecular characters
> that may be consistently derived, and consistently determined to be
> "different" somehow or the "same" (within some threshold of natural
> variation) across taxa.
> 
> 3. Also, certain people that gain reputations of deliberately ignoring sound
> data/papers are eventually ignored themselves, so I don't generally make a
> point to worry about such people. I publish my data enveloped in the most
> convincing argument I can muster about it. How others choose to accept my
> interpretations is up to them. I don't think I have a reputation of
> publishing a bunch of crap... or at least that hasn't gotten back to me yet!
> 
> >  I will not be party to any stagnation of knowledge nor
> > censorship of ideas cloaked in the mantle of name stability and concerns
> > about a cluttered literature.
> 
> Okay. Written that way, me neither.
> 
> I am happy to make such clarifications, and will continue to do so as it
> seems necessary.
> 
> James J. Kruse, Ph.D.
> Curator of Entomology
> University of Alaska Museum
> 907 Yukon Drive
> Fairbanks, AK, USA 99775-6960
> tel 907.474.5579
> fax 907.474.1987
> http://www.uaf.edu/museum/ento
> 
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