Timothy McDougald
Posts: 1036
Joined: Dec. 2006
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Earlier in the thread Paul and I were discussing fossils relevant to the reptile/mammal transition:
| Quote (Paul Nelson @ July 20 2007,15:57) | There's no problem with scaling up or down in illustrations so that anatomical features can be seen.
Not telling the reader that one is making some skulls very much bigger, and others much smaller, however, or failing to provide the dimensions of the actual fossils -- that's problematic. This is especially the case with extinct groups (e.g., therapsids), where the reader will have no frame of reference. |
Later Paul says:
| Quote | | The passage in question refers not to any claim about linear increase in size, but to the practice of depicting fossil taxa on the same scale (in illustrations), without informing the reader that the actual specimens vary considerably in size. |
Here is what the footnote I asked Paul to supply says:
| Quote | | Some authors do include the scaling ratios they use, leaving it up to the audience’s mathematical skills to calculate actual comparative size. Other authors use a scale legend line, and it’s up to the reader to notice that the same length line that represented 2 cm in Picture A represents 10 cm in Picture B. Still other authors simply put “Skulls not to scale,” somewhere in the caption. Unless students read the fine print and do the calculations, they are often left with a very misleading impression of the similarity of the animals in these alleged sequences. |
So, Exploring Evolution contradicts Paul on both of the claims he made. Which is what I call ironic...
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Church burning ebola boy
FTK: I Didn't answer your questions because it beats the hell out of me.
PaV: I suppose for me to be pried away from what I do to focus long and hard on that particular problem would take, quite honestly, hundreds of thousands of dollars to begin to pique my interest.
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