Bone A looks like bone B. Therefore bone A comes from a descendent from an ancestor of the animal which possessed bone B. That sounds like airtight "deductive" logic. No it doesn't, nor does it sound like anything resembling what paleontologists actually do to establish phylogenies. Troll.
(So far, we have a 1-to-1 correspondence between posting in colored fonts and being disingenuous.)
1,100 posted on
07/13/2004 7:44:00 PM PDT by
Ichneumon
("...she might as well have been a space alien." - Bill Clinton, on Hillary, "My Life", p. 182)
To: All
Since we're taking a side trip into the more philosophical aspects of mathematics, it seems an appropriate time to provide a link to this classic essay:
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics, by Richard W. Hamming.
Dr. Hamming's name is familiar to many people in computer science as the inventor of Hamming Codes, a method of doing error-detection-and-correction on noisy data channels.
1,104 posted on
07/13/2004 7:55:10 PM PDT by
Ichneumon
("...she might as well have been a space alien." - Bill Clinton, on Hillary, "My Life", p. 182)
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