Re: punc eq and AAS

H. M. Hubey (hubey@pegasus.montclair.edu)
7 Oct 1995 20:26:02 -0400

David Froehlich <eohippus@curly.cc.utexas.edu> writes:

>Why not? because we want decisions made by people qualified and informed
>about the nature of the problems. As you seem to suggest in you multiple

YOu seem to always miss the important stuff.

Go aaply to NASA and see if anyone will hire you.

It's the misfortune of this field that so much of it is
based on not much more than bone-gazing and making up latin
names that it invites everyone to become one.

I invite you to prove you are a better bone-eye-baller.

This is the same problem that fields like psychology and
sociology have. They deal with common everyday stuff in the
same common everday manner. Maybe the most impressive thing
they can do is to give a latin name to something and then
give some medicine to calm someone down. In your case, you
can't even prescribe chemicals to impress anyone. Either you
will turn it into a field which will resemble the other
sciences or spend your time making up scenarios of crocs
and cats in which everyone will participate.

YOu can insult people all you want. IT won't do anything impress
anyone that the SST is based on any different kind of evidence than
the one for AAT.

>So what are your qualifications? It seems to work both ways. If you are
>ignorant of a subject you should probably ask questions to correct your
>ignorance rather than make unsupported claims about the nature of the data.

1) I am an amateur.
2) I know more about science than you can imagine (judging from
the kinds of things you post).
3) I'm a great bone-gazer :-). It's a natural talent :-)..

>A perfect example of how your simple minded classification would not work
>is the case of caecilians, amphisbaenids, snakes and aistopods. All of
>which are vermiform and in your simple minded classification would all be
>snakes. Which demonstrably not all are.

IT doesn't change much of what I wrote. If all you have are bones
that's all you got to go on. I don't believe that you even
understand the mechanism of thought that produced the things
that you spent so much time memorizing.

>This is not fuzzy logic. This is based on rigorous, repeatable,
>quantifiable techniques of many kinds.

Repeatable ???? What?

>I am not asking you to read everything, all I am asking you is that you
>have a reasonable grasp of the subject before you try to discuss it with
>anybody.

>Verbiage is just that. You miss the point though in that you are trying
>to do math without learning about arithmetic.

What are you talking about?

>Sure all of this is useful. In fact it may oneday tell us alot more
>about what is going on. The problem is that you do not have a grasp of
>these subjects as they apply to paleoanthro.

Sheesh. AFter you've taken out math, DNA, chemistry, physics,
then what's left? Bone-gazing! So here we are again.

Let me ask you a simple question.

Why is the taxonomy such that it produces seven levels and not
six? Why not eight? There are ways of classifying things in
hierarchical order in other fields too but the dividing lines
are not very clear. Are you of the opinion that the present
method of classification (which I'm sure you've memorized along
with all the latin names of the critters) is "THE" only
possible way and why?

>> words or about nothing, or are about repetetion of things
>> once told/heard. It won't be over easily.

>Bullshit!!!

Answer the above question with some thinking. And tell us
if the thought that went into producing these classes is
something like solid, gas, liquid, which can naturally be
described by reference to measurements i.e. stresses,
shear stresses, and compressibility.

>Excuse me? Are you reading the same posts that I am? If a feature is
>plesiomorphic (primitive) then using to support AAS is ludicrous.

I'm reading the same posts. What feature are you talking about?

>Yeah sure, just like you read all of Alex Duncan's articles on the
>australopithecine foot. Oh, excuse me, I am sorry, they weren't worth

Excuse me. All I could see was more bone-gazing and more guesses
based on some fuzzy thinking. Does this foot look more like this
foot or that foot? Could this foot have been used for climbing
or not? Is this a half-climbing-foot or a 1/3_climbing foot?

Do you ever pay attention to what I write? What do you think
my posts are about? They are all the same kinds of fuzzy
arguments that may give warm and good feelings to practitioners
but are hard to use as "proof".

>> Besides, the problems are more complicated. We need to know
>> the temperature of the earth, the size of the ice caps, the
>> water temperature, the humidity of the region etc before some
>> of the arguments for or against could be discussed clearly.
>>
>Funny thing. We actually know alot of this information. Look in any
>geochemistry book or read some recent articles in geosciences (Geology,
>GSA Bulletin, Paleo-cubed(Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology,
>Palaeooceanography)).

Don't be a dingbat. None of this is known with the same kind of
precision and certainty say like some physical constant. It's
all derived info. Even much more rigorous fields in physics
like the beginning (i.e. big bang) etc are argued about. YOu are
now delving into a field in which things as complex as weather
figure prominently. And yes, I do know a little about the
fields you wrote above, because I happen to know about what
they are based on. As long as lots of what seem to be
independent lines of research point in the same direction
we can keep believing it. 

-- 





				Regards, Mark

				http://www.smns.montclair.edu/~hubey