Parsimony

Best, p. 71. His parsimony, for example, may have opened him to ridicule, but his biographers observe that parsimony is preferable to extravagance.

For a full treatment of cladistic parsimony, see Elliott Sober 's Reconstructing the Past: Parsimony, Evolution, and Inference (1988).

Root-Bernstein 1984, "On Defining a Scientific Theory: Creationism Considered" * Creation science violates the principle of parsimony: Parsimony favours those explanations which rely on the fewest assumptions.

However, as the years tick by, and they never return, it becomes apparent they’ve chosen to abandon their daughter, and that their parsimony has nothing to do with circumstance.

Jobs that once promised a full life for diligent work now offer a strained and limited existence, life passing by consumed by duty, or by the mix of fear and parsimony dictated by the low-wage, short-term contract.

According to the principle of ontological parsimony, he holds that we do not need to allow entities in all ten of Aristotle's categories; we thus do not need the category of quantity, as the mathematical entities are not "real".

As noted above, a cladogram is the diagrammatic result of a parsimony analysis, which groups taxa on the basis of synapomorphies alone.

Cladistic parsimony is used to support the hypotheses that require the fewest evolutionary changes.

Diagnostic parsimony advocates that when diagnosing a given injury, ailment, illness, or disease a doctor should strive to look for the fewest possible causes that account for all the symptoms.

Diagnostic parsimony and the counterbalance it finds in Hickam's dictum have very important implications in medical practice.

For an elegant introduction to the parsimony of Quine's approach to logic, see his "New Foundations for Mathematical Logic," ch. 5 in his From a Logical Point of View.

His scepticism to which his ontological parsimony request leads appears in his doctrine that human reason can prove neither the immortality of the soul nor the existence, unity, and infinity of God.

If multiple models of natural law make exactly the same testable predictions, they are equivalent and there is no need for parsimony to choose a preferred one.

Inquiries about the DNA of organisms are classed as genetic models (with short generation times, such as the fruitfly and nematode worm), experimental models, and genomic parsimony models, investigating pivotal position in the evolutionary tree.

It also enables parsimony analysis of contaminated traditions of transmission that would be impossible to evaluate manually in a reasonable period of time.

Occam's razor and parsimony support, but do not prove, these axioms of science.

Other methods for inferring evolutionary relationships use parsimony in a more traditional way.

Penal ethics In penal theory and the philosophy of punishment, parsimony refers specifically to taking care in the distribution of punishment in order to avoid excessive punishment.

Philosophers have tried to make this heuristic principle more precise in terms of theoretical parsimony or other measures.

Phylogenetics uses various forms of parsimony to decide such questions; the conclusions reached often depend on the dataset and the methods.