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To: VadeRetro
And now you're confused at the "contradiction?"

Let me quote gomaaa

Right. Bad cladogram! No biscuit! Not every single graph you pick up on the net is valid. This one is wrong. We get it. Stop bringing it up.

917 posted on 03/18/2003 4:07:00 PM PST by AndrewC
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To: AndrewC; gomaaa
Well, gomaa fell into a lawyerly trap. Bad gomaa! Darwin Central will hear about this!

OK, maybe the cladogram is bad and I missed it. But when I look at the same figure:

I see specific species "diverging" from an inferred "true" line of descent. That is, the lines with the species names come out of group names along the "descent" line. Thus, the cladogram pays tribute to the uncertainty of saying that fossil species Y is the for-sure descendant of fossil species X. A line of descent is depicted, but it does not marry itself to fossil species. An order of appearance is depicted, but it also does not marry itself to fossil species.

Which is to say, you have simply looped back to further thump the drum of "The presumed dromaeosaurid common ancestor of Archaeopteryx and Sinornithosaurus is unknown." I would assume that, if you look at cladograms all over the tree of life, there are many, many such cases where a cladogram presents a presumed order of development of features which "violates" the known fossil record for particular species and their ranges. It's presenting a historical scenario, not charting the fossil record.

That the scenario is a historical narrative and not a fossil chart is exactly why there are often competing cladograms whose differences cannot be resolved without more fossil data. (But what creationists ignore is that time passes, more data does come in, and the ambiguous areas shrink.)

920 posted on 03/18/2003 4:30:12 PM PST by VadeRetro
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