Evolution of airplanes: a follow-up

I thank Prof. Bejan for graciously replying to my critique of his work in a previous post.  Permit me to follow up briefly here.

Bejan is correct that his earlier publications have cited Tennekes and the others.  He is also right that the earlier writers did not include land and aquatic locomotion in their analyses.  I was aware of Bejan's 2006 paper with Marden (which cites Tennekes only as a data source, not for analysis) but have not seen his 2000 book published by Cambridge U.P.  I thank Prof. Bejan for clarifying these points, although my original post did make many of them already.

Nonetheless, Bejan's 2014 paper makes a specific point about the Concorde case, which Tennekes has discussed at length, as I showed.  A citation in Bejan's 2014 paper in the context of the Concorde discussion would have been pertinent for readers.  As it stands, the 2014 paper makes it seem that the 'outlying' nature of the Concorde on the diagram is a new finding, when it is not.

Bejan's comment also offers a very important distinction, one that I strongly affirm.  A purely empirical analysis of observational data is a wholly different activity to first-principles modeling of such data, especially when the latter is then validated by empirical data.  Many scientists indeed fail to appreciate this distinction.  However, the quantitative predictive modeling in Bejan's 2014 paper seems to be based on basic aerodynamic scaling arguments.  The link with evolution seems at best a metaphor; it is not clear to me that the evolutionary component of Bejan's work is predictive in any quantitative sense.  I stand by my previous comments on interpreting data, particularly the pteranadon case.  Being an outlier on the graph does not prevent the pteranadon for being fit for its ecological niche in its day.  This would seem to limit the scope of the evolutionary metaphor when linked to specific aerodynamic scaling arguments.   My methodological criticisms of correlation analysis also remain valid.