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
Ecology and Biodiversity Apes and evolution in the news 19 Jun 20094 Oct 2017 So there are a couple of interesting developments about fossil apes. One is the retraction by the author of the claim 14 years ago to have found a jaw bone that was evidence of Homo habilis, a precursor species (arguably) of H erectus, in a recent Nature. Previously he and… Read More
Evolution A nice idea 6 Jun 2009 A nice blog, albeit a bit sporadic, is Evolutionary Noveties by Todd Oakley. He has a post up on coat colour in gray wolves, written by a student. This is a great idea (if I had students this year I’d offer them extra credit for writing blog entries too), and… Read More
Creationism and Intelligent Design Random thoughts about God and evolution 27 Jun 2010 As some may know, I am writing a couple of book chapters to try to sell a proposal to a publisher for The Nature of Classification, a book I am coauthoring with Malte Ebach. I bring the philosophy and he brings the knowledge. However, this means I am not devoting… 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.