Lynch’s challenge to the Orang crowd 7 Jul 2009 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… Evolution Systematics
Evolution Bats and mice and wings and things 18 May 200818 Sep 2017 Comparative limb growth of a bat (top) and a mouse, in utero development. From the paper below. One of my favourite statistics is this: one in every four mammal species you meet is a rat or rodent, and one in every five is a bat. That’s right, nine in every… Read More
Epistemology Discussing the Evolutionary Debunking Argument 7 May 2011 John Danaher at Philosophical Disquisitions has a blog anyone with an interest in philosophy should be subscribing to. John presents simple argument diagrams and clear analyses of philosophy papers, usually those that deal with philosophy of religion and related topics. Recently he has been discussing an argument by Guy Kahane… Read More
Evolution Myth 5: Darwin thought evolution relied on accidents and chance 20 Feb 200918 Sep 2017 This myth says a lot about the default views of western thinking, rather like the issue of teleology. Read More
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.