On "Your Party".

#splitters #LifeOfBrian

https://youtu.be/WboggjN_G-4?si=lzSMaJKaFdoygOwG

This guy pitching for the Blue Jays really sucks. He keeps throwing the ball at the ground

#splitters #worldseries #dodgers #bluejays

This subject comes up fairly often, so I'm putting my mini-essay here as an easy reference. Feel free to share, or copy and paste with attribution, as you see fit. Comments, suggestions, and corrections are welcome. 🦖 🧪 🚀 ✍️

===

Michael Crichton's main reference when writing #JurassicPark was Gregory Paul's Predatory #Dinosaurs of the World. That's how we ended up with human size "velociraptors," later retconned to the considerably larger #Utahraptor. Although the poor creatures still have broken wrists and a severe case of mange.

Paul is a notorious #lumper, who likes shoving distantly related organisms into the same #taxonomic category. (The opposite of lumpers are #splitters, who try to put every specimen into as distinct a category as possible.) But even he never claimed they were the same species. Rather, he put them into the same genus, making #Deinonychus into another species of #Velociraptor, i.e. V. antirrhopus instead of D. antirrhopus.

This isn't entirely a crazy idea. Lots of modern genera have species with similar body plans but enormous size differences. Consider #Panthera, the big cats, which contains species from P. uncia, the #snowleopard, to P. tigris, the #tiger—even though tigers are generally about five times the mass of snow leopards, similar to the ratio between D. antirrhopus and V. mongoliensis.

However, there are enough other differences between Deinonychus and Velociraptor that even Paul has long since admitted this was a mistake. No #paleontologist now doubts they each belong in their own genus. Unfortunately, since Jurassic Park has so thoroughly cemented the idea of the big V, I doubt it will ever go away.

Variability among taxonomists in helminth species discrimination decisions: a noise audit

Robert Poulin et al. Int J Parasitol. 2025.

Bottom line, it is high!

#csbsp11 #taxanomy #parasite #splitters #lumpers #ecology #evolution #noise #decisionMaking

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40541603/

Open access article, and the "non-technical summary" section near the beginning gives an overview everyone can understand. 🧪🦖

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-paleontology/article/troodontid-specimens-from-the-cretaceous-two-medicine-formation-of-montana-usa-and-the-validity-of-troodon-formosus/3E58F1FDA3FE53DE569E0D0B20E79F22

Very short version: #Troodon was considered a valid #genus for well over a century, until it was merged with #Stenonychosaurus about a decade ago, and due to specimen quality Stenonychosaurus took priority. Now careful examination indicates Troodon is a valid genus again.

This process is familiar from other famous #dinosaur genera, most notably #Brontosaurus and #Apatosaurus. Even *living* animals are hard to classify a lot of the time; nothing between #kingdom and #species is really set in stone. The tension between "#lumpers" and "#splitters" never ends.

Troodon is special. Maybe it was intelligent, in a way we'd recognize as such, and maybe it wasn't. But it was almost surely *smart*, and quite possibly social, and likely an omnivore. Does that remind you of anyone?

Maybe I'm fooling myself, when I feel a kinship across deep time. And maybe I'm not.

In the #Tory leadership battle, only the deranged are welcome. Arise, #LizTruss

The quest for #PureConservatism is afoot, and the former PM is not short of ideas. The problem is that they’re all really terrible
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/oct/02/in-the-forthcoming-leadership-battle-only-the-deranged-are-welcome-step-forward-liz-truss
#ToryInfighting #Splitters!

[edit #4] given the replies on the negative, let’s just assume the concept is managed daily, subsidised by the local council through donations and sponsorship, street cleaned and cared for by employed specialists and volunteers, so people can eat the fruit. 👀

Surprised someone didn’t declare the right to be called Loretta to be honest. #splitters #lifeofbrian #montypython