Popper and likelihood versus 'Popper*'

摘要

Faith (1999) regarded Kluge's (1997) and Carpenter et al.'s (1998) discussions of corroboration as examples of "sloganized Popper." That was as distinguished from "Popper," which included (Faith, 1999:676; as throughout, italics are as in the original): ...the explicit Popperian severity/corroboration framework underlying the permutation tail probability test (PTP) and related tests. The stated degree of corroboration/severity for a PTP test of a phylogenetic hypothesis is equated with the degree of improbability, equal to the P value in evaluating a null model based on random character covariation... PTP is just Faith's name for the permutation test that Archie introduced in 1985 (see Legendre, 1986:137; cf. Archie, 1989). Now seldom used, the test does not even provide a reliable indication of phylogenetic structure in data (Kallersjo et al., 1992; Farris et al., 1994; Carpenter et al., 1998), and interpreting PTP as corroboration leads to multiple contradictions (Farris, 1995). Faith did not discuss any of those problems, however. Instead, he created a new one (Faith, 1999:678): Whereas a sloganized Popper has provided an exclusive philosophy, twisting and turning to uniquely justify cladistic parsimony, Popper is relevant to phylogenetic analyses using parsimony and other methods.