Hello Beverly,
Wednesday, January 24, 2001, 4:50:04 PM, you wrote:
>> BTW, if that last tidbit was tedious to stomach, try this one: A. Kluge's
>> article in which he placed the Diplodactylinae INTO the FAMILY Pygopidae,
>> in "Cladistic relationships in the Gekkonoidea (Squamata: Sauria) Misc.
>> Publ. Mus. Zool. Univ. Michigan 173: 1-54
BE> So how come he always publishes this stuff in these in-house newsletters
BE> instead of the *real* refereed herp lit that other libraries have???
The Misc. Publ. Mus. Zool. Univ. Michigan, while published by the
University, are subject to peer-review. Many schools and museums
publish their own publications and these types of works are
historically quite venerable and important. The University of
Michigan, for example, has been publishing its Occasional papers and
Misc. Pubs since the turn of the last century. Also, since many
journals charge authors a per page fee for publishing their work its
often cheaper to have your own institution publish large monographs and
revisions than the more familiar journals.
Most large university libraries should have these types of
publications so they are not as hard to find as you may imagine.
BE> Speaking from non-quite-total ignorance, some of Kluge's phylogenies
BE> make me nervous. He seems to select relevant and irrelevant traits
BE> strangely. Anybody else feel this way?
You bet. You have discovered the main critique to cladistic analysis: which
characters should be used when reconstructing phylogenies. While Dr.
Kluge is at the forefront of this school of thought, many other
scientists use the same methods when deducing relationships between
taxa and it does have its limitations. What you hope for is that the
person doing the work is familiar enough with the critters in question
to pick enough, and the right characters to use. Its tricky stuff and
thats why it creates so much controversy. There is a lot of resistance
to say...split turtles , lizards & snakes, and crocodilians, birds &
dinosaurs into three separate taxa (Class, subclass, whatever)...or
place chimps into the genus Homo! These things kind of rub folks the
wrong way and rightfully so...doesn't mean they're wrong, though.
--
Best regards,
Tony mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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