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Callling all cladisticists

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Nick Thompson

Callling all cladisticists

All,

For those of you who werent there, last friday, we got into an intersting discussion about the possibility of taxonomies of agent based models. Are there only a few basic types? Are many apparently different agent based models, deployed for widely different purposes, fundamentally only subtle variations?

Two positions were taken, Theirs and Mine. They argued that any such classification system must be essentially arbitrary and useful only for the narrow purposes for which it was disigned. Me argued that there MUST (note the use of modal language) be a natural taxonomy of abms. In ABM's, there must be "natural kinds". You should know that Me has never written a program longer than a seven line Word macro.

Knowing Me pretty well, I surmise that his position is shaped by his experience in evolutionary theory where taxonomy is pretty important. Taxonomic systems are mostly devised to relate contemporary species, But for evolutionary theorists, there is a natural validator of taxonomic classifications, the historical record of evolution. If we took this analogy seriously, we would be led to try and validate classifications of ABM's on the history of their development, perhaps doing dna analysis on the code fragments that make them up? Sounds like a singularly useless endeavor. But if history is uninteresting in the ABM case, why is it so interesting in the evolutionary case.

But what then about cladistics. Cladistics is a dark art of classification that uses a variety of obscure incantations to lable relations amongst species without, so far as I understand, any reference to evolution. Yet, as I understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.

So, I am wondering, you cladisticists out there, what would a cladistics of abm's look like? And should we care about it?

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Russ Abbott

Re: Callling all cladisticists

Hi Nick,

What's wrong with this argument?

My wife teaches what's known as Early Modern English, which means English literature, culture, etc. in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. She is interested in how people thought about things in her period as well as how those ways of thinking developed from previous periods. We are continually arguing about the value of that sort of study. If you are interested in the history of ideas or culture, it certainly has some value. But if you are interested in the best current thinking about a subject, why should you care how people thought about it 4 centuries ago? Do I really care about Aristotelian physics, for example, if I want to know how the physical world works? I would say, "No" what I really want to know is what the best current physicist think.

Why isn't that same argument relevant to ABMs? What one really wants to know is how we currently think about ABMs, not the history of the development of ABMs that got us there. If that history makes it easier to understand the current best thinking, so much the better. But it is only in the service of the current best thinking that history is useful when what one wants is to know the current state-of-the-art.

-- Russ

On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

All,

For those of you who werent there, last friday, we got into an intersting discussion about the possibility of taxonomies of agent based models. Are there only a few basic types? Are many apparently different agent based models, deployed for widely different purposes, fundamentally only subtle variations?

Two positions were taken, Theirs and Mine. They argued that any such classification system must be essentially arbitrary and useful only for the narrow purposes for which it was disigned. Me argued that there MUST (note the use of modal language) be a natural taxonomy of abms.  In ABM's, there must be "natural kinds". You should know that Me has never written a program longer than a seven line Word macro.

      Knowing Me pretty well, I surmise that his position is shaped by his experience in evolutionary theory where taxonomy is pretty important. Taxonomic systems are mostly devised to relate contemporary species, But for evolutionary theorists, there is a natural validator of taxonomic classifications, the historical record of evolution.   If we took this analogy seriously, we would be led to try and validate classifications of ABM's on the history of their development, perhaps doing dna analysis on the code fragments that make them up? Sounds like a singularly useless endeavor. But if history is uninteresting in the ABM case, why is it so interesting in the evolutionary case.

But what then about cladistics. Cladistics is a dark art of classification that uses a variety of obscure incantations to lable relations amongst species without, so far as I understand, any reference to evolution. Yet, as I understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.

So, I am wondering, you cladisticists out there, what would a cladistics of abm's look like? And should we care about it?

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Nick Thompson

Re: Callling all cladisticists

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Hi, Russ,

Thanks for your interesting response.

Well, the same argument could be made, could it not, against trying to gather information about human evolution. After all, it matters not how we got here, but who we are, now that we are here. However, in evolutionary psychology, I have always been soft on the value of evolutionary study for understanding human psychology because much of what we do makes more sense in terms of where we came from than it does in terms of where we are.

But, I am not sure the same argument works for the history of agent based modeling. I have never heard any agent based modeler claim that he or she gives a rat's ass about how we got where we are in that domain. Might it illuminate how we got "stuck" in some way or other? I dunno. I just dont know enough about it.

But all of this is aside from the question of the value of Taxonomy. Evolutionary considerations aside, are there natural kinds of ABM;s And would a cladistic analysis of model types be useful for programmers trying to decide what sort of approach to use to a new problem. In the ABSENSE of an interest in history, is there anything useful that taxamonies can tell us?

that is the question I was asking.

Thanks again for helping me clarify,

NIck

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

----- Original Message -----

From: [hidden email]

To: [hidden email];[hidden email]

Sent: 1/3/2009 2:16:02 PM

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists

Hi Nick,

What's wrong with this argument?

My wife teaches what's known as Early Modern English, which means English literature, culture, etc. in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. She is interested in how people thought about things in her period as well as how those ways of thinking developed from previous periods. We are continually arguing about the value of that sort of study. If you are interested in the history of ideas or culture, it certainly has some value. But if you are interested in the best current thinking about a subject, why should you care how people thought about it 4 centuries ago? Do I really care about Aristotelian physics, for example, if I want to know how the physical world works? I would say, "No" what I really want to know is what the best current physicist think.

Why isn't that same argument relevant to ABMs? What one really wants to know is how we currently think about ABMs, not the history of the development of ABMs that got us there. If that history makes it easier to understand the current best thinking, so much the better. But it is only in the service of the current best thinking that history is useful when what one wants is to know the current state-of-the-art.

-- Russ

On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

All,

For those of you who werent there, last friday, we got into an intersting discussion about the possibility of taxonomies of agent based models. Are there only a few basic types? Are many apparently different agent based models, deployed for widely different purposes, fundamentally only subtle variations?

Two positions were taken, Theirs and Mine. They argued that any such classification system must be essentially arbitrary and useful only for the narrow purposes for which it was disigned. Me argued that there MUST (note the use of modal language) be a natural taxonomy of abms.  In ABM's, there must be "natural kinds". You should know that Me has never written a program longer than a seven line Word macro.

      Knowing Me pretty well, I surmise that his position is shaped by his experience in evolutionary theory where taxonomy is pretty important. Taxonomic systems are mostly devised to relate contemporary species, But for evolutionary theorists, there is a natural validator of taxonomic classifications, the historical record of evolution.   If we took this analogy seriously, we would be led to try and validate classifications of ABM's on the history of their development, perhaps doing dna analysis on the code fragments that make them up? Sounds like a singularly useless endeavor. But if history is uninteresting in the ABM case, why is it so interesting in the evolutionary case.

But what then about cladistics. Cladistics is a dark art of classification that uses a variety of obscure incantations to lable relations amongst species without, so far as I understand, any reference to evolution. Yet, as I understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.

So, I am wondering, you cladisticists out there, what would a cladistics of abm's look like? And should we care about it?

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Russ Abbott

Re: Callling all cladisticists

Since my prejudice as a programmer is that almost any abstraction is likely to be useful, then since taxonomies tend to reveal interesting abstractions, they will very likely be useful. How could they not? At worst a taxonomy will be found to be uninteresting and unrevealing of underlying design principles. In that case, we wasted our time in building the taxonomy. But I would bet that developing ABM taxonomies will turn out to worth the effort. I can't imagine an argument that says a priori that it won't be. How could anyone possibly know that?

-- Russ

On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ,

Thanks for your interesting response.

Well, the same argument could be made, could it not, against trying to gather information about human evolution. After all, it matters not how we got here, but who we are, now that we are here. However, in evolutionary psychology, I have always been soft on the value of evolutionary study for understanding human psychology because much of what we do makes more sense in terms of where we came from than it does in terms of where we are.

But, I am not sure the same argument works for the history of agent based modeling. I have never heard any agent based modeler claim that he or she gives a rat's ass about how we got where we are in that domain. Might it illuminate how we got "stuck" in some way or other? I dunno. I just dont know enough about it.

But all of this is aside from the question of the value of Taxonomy. Evolutionary considerations aside, are there natural kinds of ABM;s And would a cladistic analysis of model types be useful for programmers trying to decide what sort of approach to use to a new problem. In the ABSENSE of an interest in history, is there anything useful that taxamonies can tell us?

that is the question I was asking.

Thanks again for helping me clarify,

NIck

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

----- Original Message -----

From: [hidden email]

To: [hidden email];[hidden email]

Sent: 1/3/2009 2:16:02 PM

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists

Hi Nick,

What's wrong with this argument?

My wife teaches what's known as Early Modern English, which means English literature, culture, etc. in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. She is interested in how people thought about things in her period as well as how those ways of thinking developed from previous periods. We are continually arguing about the value of that sort of study. If you are interested in the history of ideas or culture, it certainly has some value. But if you are interested in the best current thinking about a subject, why should you care how people thought about it 4 centuries ago? Do I really care about Aristotelian physics, for example, if I want to know how the physical world works? I would say, "No" what I really want to know is what the best current physicist think.

Why isn't that same argument relevant to ABMs? What one really wants to know is how we currently think about ABMs, not the history of the development of ABMs that got us there. If that history makes it easier to understand the current best thinking, so much the better. But it is only in the service of the current best thinking that history is useful when what one wants is to know the current state-of-the-art.

-- Russ

On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

All,

For those of you who werent there, last friday, we got into an intersting discussion about the possibility of taxonomies of agent based models. Are there only a few basic types? Are many apparently different agent based models, deployed for widely different purposes, fundamentally only subtle variations?

Two positions were taken, Theirs and Mine. They argued that any such classification system must be essentially arbitrary and useful only for the narrow purposes for which it was disigned. Me argued that there MUST (note the use of modal language) be a natural taxonomy of abms.  In ABM's, there must be "natural kinds". You should know that Me has never written a program longer than a seven line Word macro.

      Knowing Me pretty well, I surmise that his position is shaped by his experience in evolutionary theory where taxonomy is pretty important. Taxonomic systems are mostly devised to relate contemporary species, But for evolutionary theorists, there is a natural validator of taxonomic classifications, the historical record of evolution.   If we took this analogy seriously, we would be led to try and validate classifications of ABM's on the history of their development, perhaps doing dna analysis on the code fragments that make them up? Sounds like a singularly useless endeavor. But if history is uninteresting in the ABM case, why is it so interesting in the evolutionary case.

But what then about cladistics. Cladistics is a dark art of classification that uses a variety of obscure incantations to lable relations amongst species without, so far as I understand, any reference to evolution. Yet, as I understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.

So, I am wondering, you cladisticists out there, what would a cladistics of abm's look like? And should we care about it?

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Joshua Thorp

Re: Callling all cladisticists

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

I don't know anything about cladistics, so I don't know whether this fits with it.

ABMs can have many different parents, often not directly known. I'm not sure parentage in any strict sense would be a particularly good approach. Better would be to identify separate patterns in how the ABMs work. Any ABM could then be compared (even clustered) with other ABMs based on shared patterns.

High level patterns might include: how is time simulated in an ABM? How are the energy or other flows accounted for in the model? How is the environment broken up, or represented? What kinds of interactions can take place between parts of the ABM (agents, environment, ?).

Does this fit with cladistics?

--joshua

On Jan 3, 2009, at 5:25 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

cladistic

Phil Henshaw-2

Re: Callling all cladisticists

In reply to this post by Russ Abbott

The basis of taxonomy is the developmental sequences of the forms themselves, so in the case of ABM’s it would be finding who built on whose ideas and model parts. It’s basically a time network map of parentage and offspring, which naturally branches and cross fertilizes.

I asked what families of models there were at the SASO-07 conference on self-organizing and self-adapting software and controls. As I recall there were a great many variations on the pheromone ‘wisdom of the crowd’ type of learning systems and a lot of peer to peer organisms, with a couple whacko things like amorphous computing. What you’d need maybe is someone to create a relational network map and have the authors of ABM’s draw links with the ones it was based on somehow… ??

Phil Henshaw

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott
Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2009 7:39 PM
To: [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists

On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ,

Thanks for your interesting response.

that is the question I was asking.

Thanks again for helping me clarify,

NIck

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

----- Original Message -----

From: [hidden email]

To: [hidden email];[hidden email]

Sent: 1/3/2009 2:16:02 PM

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists

Hi Nick,

What's wrong with this argument?

My wife teaches what's known as Early Modern English, which means English literature, culture, etc. in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. She is interested in how people thought about things in her period as well as how those ways of thinking developed from previous periods. We are continually arguing about the value of that sort of study. If you are interested in the history of ideas or culture, it certainly has some value. But if you are interested in the best current thinking about a subject, why should you care how people thought about it 4 centuries ago? Do I really care about Aristotelian physics, for example, if I want to know how the physical world works? I would say, "No" what I really want to know is what the best current physicist think.

Why isn't that same argument relevant to ABMs? What one really wants to know is how we currently think about ABMs, not the history of the development of ABMs that got us there. If that history makes it easier to understand the current best thinking, so much the better. But it is only in the service of the current best thinking that history is useful when what one wants is to know the current state-of-the-art.

-- Russ

On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

All,

For those of you who werent there, last friday, we got into an intersting discussion about the possibility of taxonomies of agent based models. Are there only a few basic types? Are many apparently different agent based models, deployed for widely different purposes, fundamentally only subtle variations?

Two positions were taken, Theirs and Mine. They argued that any such classification system must be essentially arbitrary and useful only for the narrow purposes for which it was disigned. Me argued that there MUST (note the use of modal language) be a natural taxonomy of abms.  In ABM's, there must be "natural kinds". You should know that Me has never written a program longer than a seven line Word macro.

      Knowing Me pretty well, I surmise that his position is shaped by his experience in evolutionary theory where taxonomy is pretty important. Taxonomic systems are mostly devised to relate contemporary species, But for evolutionary theorists, there is a natural validator of taxonomic classifications, the historical record of evolution.   If we took this analogy seriously, we would be led to try and validate classifications of ABM's on the history of their development, perhaps doing dna analysis on the code fragments that make them up? Sounds like a singularly useless endeavor. But if history is uninteresting in the ABM case, why is it so interesting in the evolutionary case.

But what then about cladistics. Cladistics is a dark art of classification that uses a variety of obscure incantations to lable relations amongst species without, so far as I understand, any reference to evolution. Yet, as I understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.

So, I am wondering, you cladisticists out there, what would a cladistics of abm's look like? And should we care about it?

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Douglas Roberts-2

Re: Callling all cladisticists

On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 8:41 PM, Phil Henshaw <[hidden email]> wrote:

The basis of taxonomy is the developmental sequences of the forms themselves, so in the case of ABM's it would be finding who built on whose ideas and model parts. It's basically a time network map of parentage and offspring, which naturally branches and cross fertilizes.

Well, I've been designing, developing, and using ABMS for pert' near 18 years, but I must confess that the the two sentences above conveyed absolutely no meaning to my poor, befuddled brain.

I' serious: none.

Clearly it must be time for me to swarm over to the Carnot-Cycle device and prise open the magnetic strip- secured metallic thermal barrier and extract a fused-silicon hermetically-sealed pressure vessel containing Brettanomyces-modified Hordeum vulgare carbohydrate, hopefully tinctured with a moderate dosage of Humulus Lupulus-produced aromatic oils.

Then, once I'm done with that one, I might just go get myself another beer from the refrigerator.

--
Doug Roberts, RTI International
[hidden email]
[hidden email]
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Callling all cladisticists

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Nicholas Thompson wrote:
>
> But what then about cladistics. Cladistics is a dark art of
> classification that uses a variety of obscure incantations to lable
> relations amongst species without, so far as I understand, any
> reference to evolution. Yet, as I understand it, cladistics is not
> arbitrary.
In both cases it boils down to selecting a set of features and assigning
them to a set of character states. With DNA, the job is done because
the character states are A G C or T in long strings. But can also
consider an encoding like C=has claws, !C does not have claws, L=has
lungs, !L has no lungs, V=has vertebrae, !V not vertebrae, F=fur, !F no
fur, and so on. To make a taxonomy, similarity techniques like
neighbor-joining or distance methods are often used. To go to the next
step and consider an evolutionary model, then things get complex fast
because, for example, it is necessary to be able to say how a critter
goes from having no hair to having it, or develops lungs and the
relative impotance of those things. On the other hand, it is not
nearly so hard if the transition you want to describe is one of an
adenine changing to guanine, which is chemistry.

I think a high-level description of conceptual model features (like
those Joshua suggested) as character states would work for making
similarity trees without an evolutionary model behind them. The main
work there is deciding on the features.

And on the other extreme, one could probably come up with some very
crude evolutionary model for local change of machine code based on
context and knowledge of common programming idioms and/or the source
language and compiler. Even if you had that, though, one thing that is
assumed by most phylogenetics programs is a multiple alignment. That
is, for any code fragment found anywhere in a given program, the same
fragment can be found in any another aligned down to the opcode. Then
there's the small matter that horizontal gene transfer happens all the
time in software as 3rd party libraries get pulled in and dropped and
software factoring is going on. In principle, I bet with sufficient
effort one could probably recover the revision history of some large
project like GCC from various binaries of different ages. But better
just to go the revision system and look at the history directly. With
GCC it goes back 20 years or something.

Marcus

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Callling all cladisticists

In reply to this post by Russ Abbott

Russ Abbott wrote:
> But if you are interested in the best current thinking about a
> subject, why should you care how people thought about it 4 centuries ago?
What if there are common processes behind learning and insight and they
are general and timeless?

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Douglas Roberts-2

Re: Callling all cladisticists

In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels

Ok, Marcus. But what does that buy the developer of a C^3I (Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence) war gaming ABM? Or and ABM of the pork bellies market? Or an ABM of celestial mechanics? Or an ABM of the braking system of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner? Or an ABM of a specific social network where the intent is to model the onset of terroristic behavior within that society?

I fail to see how a taxonomy-based formal description methodology aimed at classifying of ABM categories would buy anything useful for either the developer or the user of an ABM.

ABMS are designed and implemented to model the interactions of real-world entities, at whatever level of abstraction that will produce results which can provide information that might be useful for addressing the problem the ABM was developed to solve. I seriously doubt that there is a one-size-fits-all taxonomy classifier for ABMs that will produce anything other than "No shit!" rudimentary descriptive information about any given ABM.

But hey! I've been wrong before, and I seriously plan to be wrong again.

--Doug

On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 9:25 PM, Marcus G. Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nicholas Thompson wrote:

But what then about cladistics. Cladistics is a dark art of classification that uses a variety of obscure incantations to lable relations amongst species without, so far as I understand, any reference to evolution. Yet, as I understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.

In both cases it boils down to selecting a set of features and assigning them to a set of character states. With DNA, the job is done because the character states are A G C or T in long strings. But can also consider an encoding like C=has claws, !C does not have claws, L=has lungs, !L has no lungs, V=has vertebrae, !V not vertebrae, F=fur, !F no fur, and so on. To make a taxonomy, similarity techniques like neighbor-joining or distance methods are often used. To go to the next step and consider an evolutionary model, then things get complex fast because, for example, it is necessary to be able to say how a critter goes from having no hair to having it, or develops lungs and the relative impotance of those things. On the other hand, it is not nearly so hard if the transition you want to describe is one of an adenine changing to guanine, which is chemistry.

I think a high-level description of conceptual model features (like those Joshua suggested) as character states would work for making similarity trees without an evolutionary model behind them. The main work there is deciding on the features.
And on the other extreme, one could probably come up with some very crude evolutionary model for local change of machine code based on context and knowledge of common programming idioms and/or the source language and compiler. Even if you had that, though, one thing that is assumed by most phylogenetics programs is a multiple alignment. That is, for any code fragment found anywhere in a given program, the same fragment can be found in any another aligned down to the opcode. Then there's the small matter that horizontal gene transfer happens all the time in software as 3rd party libraries get pulled in and dropped and software factoring is going on. In principle, I bet with sufficient effort one could probably recover the revision history of some large project like GCC from various binaries of different ages. But better just to go the revision system and look at the history directly. With GCC it goes back 20 years or something.

Marcus

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Callling all cladisticists

Douglas Roberts wrote:
> I seriously doubt that there is a one-size-fits-all taxonomy
> classifier for ABMs that will produce anything other than "No shit!"
> rudimentary descriptive information about any given ABM.
It might be informative to see map of invented conceptual attributes and
applications can be partitioned across a large set of models. I can't
deny this just amounts to classifying individual models. It's just that
I don't think it is interesting to say "Model 1 is a A type", and "Model
2 is B type" in isolation. The interesting part would be the locations
of A and B and others in a multidimensional space. (That's why I first
suggested the Euler diagrams in response to Glen's proposal.)

Marcus

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Steve Smith

Re: Callling all cladisticists

In reply to this post by Douglas Roberts-2

Doug -

Methinks that that cartilaginous shrapnel has been traveling from knee to brain. A distillation of said yeasty brew might be better at dissolving the blockages.

-Steve

Sent from my iPhone

On Jan 3, 2009, at 9:04 PM, "Douglas Roberts" <[hidden email]> wrote:

my poor, befuddled brain.

I' serious: none.

Clearly it must be time for me to swarm over to the Carnot-Cycle device and prise open the magnetic strip- secured metallic thermal barrier and extract a fused-silicon hermetically-sealed pressure vessel containing Brettanomyces-modified Hordeum vulgare carbohydrate, hopefully tinctured with a moderate dosage of Humulus Lupulus-produced

James Steiner

Re: Callling all cladisticists

In reply to this post by Russ Abbott

> But if you are
> interested in the best current thinking about a subject, why should you care
> how people thought about it 4 centuries ago? Do I really care about
> Aristotelian physics, for example, if I want to know how the physical world
> works? I would say, "No" what I really want to know is what the best current
> physicist think.

I disagree with this, if you are, in addition to knowing about
physics, trying to advance the state of physics. You need to know not
only the best current thought, but also at least some of the worst
deprecated thoughts, so that you don't use your shiny new tools to
re-invent a rusty broken wheel. Also, it's sometimes good for a
laugh.

~~James.

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Phil Henshaw-2

Re: Callling all cladisticists

In reply to this post by Douglas Roberts-2

Hmmm,… that does seem to be a problem for me sometimes. Didn’t you build on other people’s ideas and incorporate them in you models, and so create an inheritance connection between them?

Phil Henshaw

NY NY www.synapse9.com

On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 8:41 PM, Phil Henshaw <[hidden email]> wrote:

The basis of taxonomy is the developmental sequences of the forms themselves, so in the case of ABM's it would be finding who built on whose ideas and model parts. It's basically a time network map of parentage and offspring, which naturally branches and cross fertilizes.