Are data indentured servants or free agents?
Although less extreme than prohibiting results outright, cladists also prohibit use of certain data for certain results. Notably, many of them bridle at letting temporal data participate in choosing among cladograms. Yet argument is the bridge between data and interpretation. Declaring classes of data irrelevant to a given problem presumes that every argument within which those data might be used is invalid. The history of science is replete with examples of data once judged irrelevant to a given problem that were later recognized to shed new light, once incorporated in a new argument. Norell and Novacek12 argued that stratigraphic data cannot be used in phylogenetic inference because temporal position does not incorporate a hypothesis of homology. Yet homology is not the only expression of order in nature. Stratigraphy provides another. Faulting stratigraphy for its lack of a homology relation judges one argument by a criterion native to another. Homology may be critical to use of cha
