On 9/23/21 5:50 AM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 12:31:16 AM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
>> On 9/22/21 6:44 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>> On Tuesday, September 21, 2021 at 3:31:45 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
>>>> On 9/21/21 12:04 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>>>> I've got a lot of grading of quizzes to do, so I can only spare time for a side issue:
>>>>>
>>>>> On Monday, September 20, 2021 at 10:10:29 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
>>>>>> On 9/20/21 6:51 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>>>>>> On Wednesday, September 15, 2021 at 5:07:25 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
>>>>>>>> On 9/15/21 12:16 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> In short, neither of the two creatures that made Henry Gee so sure
>>>>>>>>> were of much use as evidence for birds being dinosaurs.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> That evidence was at least good enough for Feduccia to change his mind about whether
>>>>>>>> birds were coelurosaurs. Of course he settled that by then going on to
>>>>>>>> claim that coelurosaurs weren't dinosaurs.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Did he now? I don't recall anyone claiming he went that far before, not even you.
>>>>>>> The biggest clade I recall you claiming before was Maniraptora,
>>>>>>> a far cry from all of coelurosauria. Can you give me a direct quote
>>>>>>> to support your "Of course..." comment?
>>>>>
>>>>>> Yes, I probably should have said "maniraptorans", as in MANIAC.
>>>>>
>>>>> You are merely replacing one undocumented claim about Feduccia with a slightly earlier one
>>>>> that you made this week or last week, with maniraptorans in place of coelurosaurs.
>>>>>
>>>>> Then as now, your claim was unequivocal, and I suspected that you were editorializing
>>>>> much more nuanced statements by Feduccia, which is all I recall seeing from him.
>>>
>>> Your "presumably discussing" in the next paragraph is centered on the following post of mine:
>
> It looks like Giganews, or whatever, is letting you down, John, about the following url:
It would be Safari that's letting me down in that case. Oddly, Chrome
takes me to a different post that seems subsequent to the one you're
trying to point me at.
>>> https://groups.google.com/g/sci.bio.paleontology/c/UY2Hcee5Ez8/m/qHXXpRbgAgAJ
>>> Re: A new shark-toothed theropod from Uzbekistan
>>> Sep 15, 2021, 9:13:09 PM
>
>> That just goes to the OP in another thread.
>
> That OP was made well before Sep 15, 2021, 9:13:09 PM.
>
> When I clicked the above url just now, it took me straight to the post I was telling you about.
> Your last paragraph there stated:
>
> "If you want specifics, the one I remember best is that in the middle of the article he went from claiming that dromaeosaurs couldn't possibly be related to birds to claiming that they couldn't possibly be dinosaurs."
>
> As I told Erik almost two hours before you did this post of yours,
>
> "If that's what Harshman remembers best, I'd hate to think what he remembers worst. :-) :-("
So impressed by your cleverness that you are forced to repeat it? Have
you bothered to look yet?
>> What does that have to do with anything?
>
> If you had read the attribution line of the OP of THIS thread, you would have seen an url of a post
> of yours to which I was replying. Don't urls show up in blue in Giganews?
>>>> What I recall from the article we were presumably discussing is that
>>>> Feduccia spends the first part of it showing that Deinonychus carpals
>>>> were not homologous to Archaeopteryx carpals and thus the former is a
>>>> dinosaur while the latter is not, and then pivoting to a claim that
>>>> feathers on deinonychids show that they are birds, not dinosaurs.
>>>
>>> Sorry, that won't do. You have made a blunder beginning with "Of course..." and
>>> modified your claim. Now you have further modified your claim and are
>>> now accusing Feduccia of a self-contradiction on a single detail involving
>>> only a small subclade of Maniraptora.
>
> Evidently that small subclade is the genus Deinonychus; is "deinonychids"
> simply a synonym for that genus?
The name seems to have fallen out of favor. But it includes more than
Deinonychus. At a minimum, it also includes Utahraptor. But this is a
trivial detail not relevant to my point. If Deinonychus is not a
dinosaur, then dromaeosaurs are not dinosaurs, unless you want to
dismember Dromaeosauridae.
>> Yes, that was a mistake. But the point is that he claimed birds can't be
>> dinosaurs based on that a lack of relationship to Deinonychus and in the
>> same paper claimed that Deinonychus wasn't a dinosaur either, so even if
>> it's related to Archaeopteryx, birds still aren't dinosaurs. This is not
>> a mere self-contradiction.
>
> You are piling one thing on top of another here, yet you still haven't done
> what you are telling ME to do: google an article that you have FINALLY,
> belatedly, given me a reference to, but no url for it even now.
I assure you that if you just google the title you will easily find a
copy. Why not try?
> And I'm wondering whether you misread something Feduccia wrote
> there, like you did about microraptors below. Keep reading.
Wonder no more. Just read.
>>>>> This earlier one had to do with him having made the change of mind in _Auk_.
>>>>> So you should have no trouble digging up an exact quote.
>>>
>>>> We have discussed this at length before. You might refresh your memory
>>>> by looking at the article in question.
>>>
>>> I have no memory of that article at all, and have no idea where to look for it.
>>> It is YOU, obviously, who needs to refresh your memory of the article about which
>>> you "held court" in talk.origins to a rapt audience + one notorious species
>>> immutabilist for 50 posts before I came on the scene.
>
>> Feduccia A. 2002. Birds are dinosaurs: Simple answer to a complex
>> problem. Auk 119:1187–1201. Try google.
>
> Google it yourself, and tell us where in it you read these two things.
> Who knows, you might be in for a nasty surprise if you finally do what you should
> have done on September 15.
Your resistance to looking things up, even when you've been provided an
easy reference, is odd.
>>> Your recollection of those heady days now has had you narrowing a claim thus:
>>>
>>> Coelurosaurs -----> Maniraptorans ------> Deionychids
>> I will admit that in that article Feduccia failed to make clear just
>> where on the theropod tree he wanted to detach a clade. Somewhere
>> including all feathered theropods, but the rest is unstated. He's not
>> into phylogenetic trees.
>
> Nor into cladistic classification? Did he still rely on Linnean taxa back in 2002?
I don't think that entered into the discussion. No, what he's not into
is as I said: phylogenetic trees. Also cladistic methodology in
constructing trees. Not one word on classification.
>>>> Or you could check out a more
>>>> recent Auk article
>>>
>>> ... about which you don't even claim an inconsistency, like you originally
>>> claimed Feduccia made about Maniraptora, which you ambitiously changed to coelurosaurs
>>> before backpedaling to Maniraptora and now to deionychids.
>
>> That's a consistent misspelling, so I should correct you: deinonychids.
>
>>>> in which he shows to his satisfaction that
>>>> Microraptor (and by extension other dromaeosaurs) is not a theropod:
>>>> Feduccia A. 2013. Bird origins anew. Auk 130:1-12.
>
> Glenn was more helpful than you: he provided an url for the article:
>
> https://academic.oup.com/auk/article/130/1/1/5148815
>
> And in all the 16 "microraptor" hits, he never claims that Microraptor is not a
> theropod.
Agreed, he never said those words. It's necessary to read for
comprehension, not sound bites.
> The closest he comes is the fifth in a series of things he attributes
> to your kind of "orthodoxy," beginning with:
>
> "(5) The so-called four-winged gliding microraptors and the feathered Jurassic forms with non-theropod features are all considered dinosaurs.
>
> He is only talking about features not typical of theropods, especially what orthodoxy calls "the frame shift" of the phalanges ("avian hand bones," see the end of the next sentence):
>
> "Yet the microraptors have advanced avian wings with a precise arrangement of primary and secondary pennaceous feathers, and innumerable other avian features, including an avian skull and teeth, avian feet, and precise arrangement of avian hand bones. These advanced characters argue that microraptors represent derivatives of, rather than being ancestral to, the early avian radiation, with dromaeosaurids at all stages of flight and flightlessness. They are literally bristling with uncoded avian characters, but these are swamped in cladistic analyses by the background noise of co-correlated characters associated with bipedalism and a mesotarsal foot joint. Interestingly, the microraptor *Sinornithosaurus*, typically reconstructed as an earthbound cursor, had elongate hindlimb flight feathers, which would have impeded ground locomotion, and exhibits a well-developed posterolateral bony flange and a strongly bowed outer metacarpal, making its hand better suited for support of primary feathers than that of *Archaeopteryx* (Paul 2002). As Paul notes (p. 407), “The combination of a well-developed posterolateral flange and a strongly bowed metacarpal III [outer metacarpal] made the hand of flightless Sinornithosaurus better suited for supporting primary feathers than was the hand of flying Archaeopteryx.”
>
How can you possibly interpret this as failing to claim that Microraptor
isn't a theropod? And Feduccia as usual conflates the disagreement over
phylogeny with a separate disagreement over the trees-down vs. ground-up
origin of flight. Paul did not.
>>> You've made allegations about Feduccia of a magnitude that would make you highly indignant
>>> if a similar allegation were made of you. And he isn't even here to defend himself -- and it
>>> also gets your dander up when I say something the least bit negative about an
>>> absent person whom you don't have a bad opinion of, yourself.
>
>> I would be indignant because I don't do that sort of thing,
>
> "that sort of thing" was jeering at Feduccia for apparently contradicting himself.
Then you have stated it poorly. Is it the jeering you object to or the
claim of contradiction?
> You HATE it when I do something like that to someone like Prum.
When have you accused Prum of contradicting himself? Was it justified?
>> while Feduccia did. And hey, you're the one who brought up Feduccia. I'm just
>> following you down your own rabbit hole.
>
> Read my reply to Erik's first post, and you will see how the rabbit hole is your making, not mine.
I read it and see nothing that's relevant to ownership of the rabbit hole.
>>> Try behaving like a responsible adult and QUOTING something that backs up something along
>>> the lines of one of your claims about the earlier article. How long does it take to dig up the article,
>>> copy and paste one passage out of it and then another, incompatible passage?
>>>
>>> I don't think it would take much longer than it took me to dig up the the post that was
>>> in the middle of our earlier discussion, figure out two of the three lines of documentation
>>> that I posted up there, and to paste them in. And to save you time, I'm even telling you that the last
>>> thirteen lines of text in it are all you need to look at.
>
> No reply from you. Your "rabbit hole" accusation perfectly exhibits just WHY threads
> involving you and me degenerate into the sort of thing that makes either you
> or erik explicitly want *me* to return to discussing paleontology.
> Well, I gave you more paleontology and more cladistics in that one Feduccia quote
> than you give me in most whole threads. If you can't bring yourself to quote from
> that 2002 article, I'll gladly discuss an intelligent reply to what he wrote there.
Been done to death long ago. Why are you trying to resurrect this silly
discussion? What is this obsession with Feduccia?