• Of dinosaurs and mathematics: Classification of a dinosaur bone found i

    From Popping Mad@21:1/5 to All on Thu Jun 15 06:23:13 2023
    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140605082950.htm

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  • From John Harshman@21:1/5 to Popping Mad on Thu Jun 15 06:25:43 2023
    On 6/15/23 3:23 AM, Popping Mad wrote:
    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140605082950.htm

    Paleontologists don't use mathematics? Never heard of morphometrics, for example? And can we really be sure that a single character in a single
    bone is diagnostic, never subject to homoplasy? This smells of
    university press release hype. You should check out the actual paper to
    see what actually happened.

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  • From Pandora@21:1/5 to john.harshman@gmail.com on Thu Jun 15 18:56:14 2023
    On Thu, 15 Jun 2023 06:25:43 -0700, John Harshman
    <john.harshman@gmail.com> wrote:

    On 6/15/23 3:23 AM, Popping Mad wrote:
    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140605082950.htm

    Paleontologists don't use mathematics?

    Yeah right, never heard of the nonparametric difficulty measure? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-35784-3

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  • From John Harshman@21:1/5 to Pandora on Thu Jun 15 18:15:15 2023
    On 6/15/23 9:56 AM, Pandora wrote:
    On Thu, 15 Jun 2023 06:25:43 -0700, John Harshman
    <john.harshman@gmail.com> wrote:

    On 6/15/23 3:23 AM, Popping Mad wrote:
    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140605082950.htm

    Paleontologists don't use mathematics?

    Yeah right, never heard of the nonparametric difficulty measure? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-35784-3

    I wonder what S. J. Gould, Dave Raup, Jack Sepkoski, etc., would say
    about this if they were still around? Or plenty of paleontologists who
    are actually with us, like Mike Foote, John Alroy, etc., etc.

    Maybe this is just another example of university press release hype.

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  • From Pandora@21:1/5 to john.harshman@gmail.com on Fri Jun 16 11:51:49 2023
    On Thu, 15 Jun 2023 18:15:15 -0700, John Harshman
    <john.harshman@gmail.com> wrote:

    On 6/15/23 9:56 AM, Pandora wrote:
    On Thu, 15 Jun 2023 06:25:43 -0700, John Harshman
    <john.harshman@gmail.com> wrote:

    On 6/15/23 3:23 AM, Popping Mad wrote:
    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140605082950.htm

    Paleontologists don't use mathematics?

    Yeah right, never heard of the nonparametric difficulty measure?
    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-35784-3

    I wonder what S. J. Gould, Dave Raup, Jack Sepkoski, etc., would say
    about this if they were still around?

    Those were the days when you could generate every possible shellshape,
    from gastropod and bivalve to ammonoid, with a circular generating
    curve and just three parameters (W, D, T).
    But those were also the days of Sokal and Sneath (Numerical Taxonomy)
    and the translation of Willi Hennig in English.

    Or plenty of paleontologists who
    are actually with us, like Mike Foote, John Alroy, etc., etc.

    Maybe this is just another example of university press release hype.

    We used to think that every science is ultimately a branch of physics,
    but Galileo was right, every science is ultimately a branch of
    mathematics, ever more sophisticated.

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