Questions

If anyone has questions, comments or objections, feel free to post them. I will do my best to answer them

Two Dimensions

In situations where we see contradictions, the answer is often that there are two dimensions that are involved but we are only acknowledging one of them.
That is what is going on with the subject we are looking at - the origin and development of species.
There are actually two dimensions. You could call one the horizontal and one the vertical.
Cladistics for example, does not acknowledge the vertical dimension and tries to collapse everything into the horizontal line of time. This can never be successful of course.
The Linnaean conception acknowledges the vertical dimension but not the horizontal dimension.
Both dimensions must be acknowledged because REALITY is in two dimensions.
It is only when we acknowledge both dimensions that we will understand the underlying reality.

For what it is worth, the closest we come now, is the conception of serial anagenesis with parallel evolution. That is the model I use in the pterosaur to bird theory.

* Dino to Bird Theory (4)

CIRCULARITY:
http://www.bio.fsu.edu/James/Ornitho...phs%202009.pdf
"The congruence of other characters is sometimes
offered as justification for such assumptions:
birds are theropods because they share
other characters with theropods and, therefore,
must have the same digital identities as theropods
(e.g., Wagner and Gauthier 1999, Makovicky and
Dyke 2001, Padian 2001b). This reasoning is circular.
Synapomorphies are invoked to defend the
hypothesis; the hypothesis is invoked to defend
the synapomorphies."

* Dino to Bird Theory (3)

Here is a reference to what I am talking about:
http://www.bio.fsu.edu/James/Ornitho...phs%202009.pdf
"Unjustifiable assumptions of homology incorporated
into data matrices.—The most glaring example of
this problem is the coding of avian and theropod
manual, carpal, and tarsal characters as if they were
homologous, despite the ambiguity of the data,
and despite the assumption this coding entails that
the BMT [dino to bird theory] hypothesis is correct a priori (Martin et al.
1980; Martin 1983, 1991; Martin and Stewart 1985;
Burke and Feduccia 1997; Feduccia 1999; Wagner
and Gauthier 1999; Feduccia and Nowicki 2002;
Kundrát et al. 2002; Larsson and Wagner 2002; Galis
et al. 2003, 2005; Mayr et al. 2005, 2007; Vargas
and Fallon 2005a, b; Welten et al. 2005; Appendix
3)."

* Dino to Bird Theory (2)

Here is the larger context to put this in, related to "normal science".
http://gothling.tripod.com/paradigm.html
"Textbooks, more than perhaps any other force in science, represent the bulwarks of existing paradigms. Students of science learn to deal with the world around them in the context of the paradigm they are taught. Ideally, students then grapple with the issues left unresolved within their paradigm and thus continue what Kuhn [Thomas Kuhn] calls the enterprise of "normal science"--"an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies". In dealing with nature through an existing paradigm, scientists are inherently conservative. They generally shun new theories that may shake their views of the world. According to Kuhn, however, this conservatism is not only inevitable, it is desirable: "By focusing attention upon a small range of relatively esoteric problems, the paradigm forces scientists to investigate some part of nature in a detail and depth that would otherwise be unimaginable". Normal science is essential for fact-gathering that may help confirm, clarify, or even extend paradigms. They also help to match facts with theory, and they even help to make theories more acceptable by, for instance, making them more aesthetically palatable. More fundamentally, normal science can be seen as puzzle-solving, where paradigms determine the parameters and rules for the puzzle. In other words, the paradigm sets the parameters in which scientists may view the world. Researchers must then attempt to solve the puzzles by looking for missing pieces and connecting them into a cohesive whole.

Where Paradigms Fail. This [normal science] period of puzzle solving, however, is often disrupted by discovery, at which point scientists must call into question the rules by which they were solving the puzzle. Restated, "Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly, i.e. with the recognition that nature has somehow violated the paradigm-induced expectations that govern normal science". Anomaly must emerge within the context of an existing paradigm--otherwise, scientists would be unable to even recognize it."

* Dino to Bird Theory (1)

Here is a rather typical article on the dino to bird theory:
http://www.biomedsearch.com/attachme...j0149-0001.pdf

It purports to show the relationships between certain taxa and implies the validity of the dino to bird theory.
But what it actually does is, it assumes the validity of the dino to bird theory and then shows that if that theory is valid here is how the taxa would be related.
If only they would be honest and say that, things would be so much clearer.

This pattern occurs quite frequently. The authors of many, many studies and articles do not evaluate the validity of the dino to bird theory. THEY ASSUME the validity of the theory and then arrange things around that assumption.
And then people in this field say that the dino to bird theory is valid because look at how much validating material there is over the years. They forget (ignore) that those studies were based on the assumption of the dino to bird theory.