Further to the claim I mentioned a while back, on orangutans being the closest species to humans, not chimps, John Lynch has a post up on the phylogeny of ERV sequences in the great apes which show, independently of the methods that Grehan and Schwartz criticised. He asks how they might respond. Allow me to play devil’s advocate:
Endogenous retroviral insertion is not constrained by phylogeny, as studies of host race parasites has shown. So ya boo sucks.
Of course I don’t believe this for a minute, but I can see how this is going to go. It’s another Birds Are Not Dinosaurs…
You could at least have the decency to link to my post
Actually, you could also have the decency to explain why the Devil’s Advocate position is wrong
I’ll stop grousing now.
Oops. Fixed now. Actually there doesn’t seem to me to be a general argument why the Devil’s Advocate position is wrong. It’s a matter of specific details, like why we would think that erv sequences are in general more likely to be apomorphies than homoplasies, and so it doesn’t actually have a knockdown (or rather, no more than the use of traditional morphology and molecular data would knock it down). I find that curious.
It would have made Robert Wokler rather happy.
He had particular views about the Orang in the enlightenment.