Both religion and science start with basic assumptions that cannot be proved but are taken on faith. Here I note that one basic assumption that is rather common in both enterprises is the assumption that in comparing different hypotheses that all equally explain the observations, the simpler hypotheses are more probable (Occam's razor or the law of parsimony). That is, explanations should be ma...

lution gain in depth and strength when we consider all the evidence together. Scenarios that are most parsimonious for the one dataset are not necessarily the most parsimonious when viewed globally. Jeffrey Rogers Paul B. Samollow Anthony G. Comuzzie Department of Genetics, Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research, Post Office Box 760549, San Antonio, TX 78245, USA E-mail: [email protected]...

This dissertation investigates the possibility of justifying simplicity principles in science. The labor of these projects is organized into three chapters. The first chapter introduces some of the key authors and issues in the history of simplicity in science. This chapter also gives a detailed discussion of the work of the 19th century physicists Le Verrier and Newcomb who played a crucial ro...

Fossil taxa are critical to inferences of historical diversity and the origins of modern biodiversity, but realizing their evolutionary significance is contingent on restoring fossil species to their correct position within the tree of life. For most fossil species, morphology is the only source of data for phylogenetic inference; this has traditionally been analysed using parsimony, the predom...

Partial 18S rRNA sequences of five chelicerate arthropods plus a crustacean, myriapod, insect, chordate, echinoderm, annelid, and platyhelminth were compared. The sequence data were used to infer phylogeny by using a maximum-parsimony method, an evolutionary-distance method, and the evolutionary-parsimony method. The phylogenetic inferences generated by maximum-parsimony and distance methods su...

Eighty-eight female subjects were assigned to dyads homogeneously composed with regard to their valuation of risk acceptance (low or high) as well as their need for approval (Iow or high). The dyads discussed each of a set of hypothetical decision situations involving risk taking and, at the end of each discussion l indicated the risk levels acceptable for them. High-value dyads shifted signifi...

The inference of evolutionary relationships is usually aided by a reconstruction method which is expected to produce a reasonably accurate estimation of the true evolutionary history. However, various factors are known to impede the reconstruction process and result in inaccurate estimates of the true evolutionary relationships. Detecting and removing errors (wrong branches) from tree estimates...

The purpose of this study was to determine the value of the PCAT as a predictor of academic success and to provide a method for other institutions to use when evaluating predictors of academic success. Independent variables included all PCAT scores, prepharmacy GPA, math and science GPA, and attainment of a previous college degree. The dependent variable was cumulative professional first year G...

Here we respond to some comments by Alday concerning headedness in linguistic theory and the validity of the assumptions of a mathematical model for word order. For brevity, we focus only on two assumptions: the unit of measurement of dependency length and the monotonicity of the cost of a dependency as a function of its length. We also revise the implicit psychological bias in Alday’s comments...

Dempster’s covariance selection method is extended first to general nonsingular matrices and then to full rank rectangular matrices. Dempster observed that his completion solved a maximum entropy problem. We show that our generalized completions are also solutions of a suitable entropy-like variational problem.