As much as I have enjoyed the debate, it seems strange to have people chime
for Umberto and I to continue the debate. I think Umberto is right and that
we certainly should not be the only ones. Besides, I think Umberto and I
are on the same page of the book, only we have different titles on our
books. Umberto apparently has issues with my book's title of "Fixed Rules"
but apparently engages in many applications of such rules and notes this by
saying that there are generally accepted rules in the scientific community
we follow in proper research and they are inclusive of rigorous analysis,
clarity of adopted methods, presentation of data that support conclusions,
etc. That all sounds like stuff in my book, only he is reading from his
book, "Unfixed Rules."
Those are all traits that I see that are very necessary to proper research,
regardless of what they are called or how they are classified. What
concerned me was that potentially Umberto was suggesting research without
such traits since there were to be no fixed rules. What I feared was that
research would likely produce results that could not be replicated. The
example that comes to mind is a story that Stanley Olsen told me back in the
late 1980s. Stan was comparing his faunal data to work done by another
researcher at nearby sites and noted that the other researcher had
identified three specific song birds based on the osteology, only what made
these birds different breeding species could not be found at the
osteological level. The difference was in their song. When Stan queried
the other researcher about how the guy made the identifications, the
researcher said basically that there were a lot of osteological specimens
and that all three occur in the region, hence all three must be in the
assemblage. As Stan noted, how it was that the researcher was able to come
up with a tabulation of X number for each species was beyond further
questioning. Stan would not tell us who the researcher was because the
researcher was still alive at the time. Stan was a gentleman about such
things.
Obviously, my fears that Umberto might have been championing a pursuit of
unfixed rules such as in the example above are completely alleviated.
Cheers,
Brian
|