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 A code for area names 18 Jun 2008 One of the most important documents published in zoology in the 19th century was in fact a rather mundane one: The Strickland Code: Hugh. E. Strickland, John Phillips, John Richardson, Richard Owen, Leonard Jenyns, William J. Broderip, John S. Henslow, William E. Shuckard, George R. Waterhouse, William Yarrell, Charles R…. Read More
Evolution Chloroplast origins 6 May 2009 Chris Taylor at Catalogue of Organisms has an absolutely stunning review of the origin of chloroplasts in eukaryotes. It’s so good I thought it was from Elio Schaechter’s blog Small Things Considered when it first popped up in my reader – higher praise there is not. Read More
Biology Darwin was not badly received by the church 26 Nov 2009 Robert J. Berry is a geneticist at University College London. He is also an evangelical Christian and has written a number of works on the compatibility of religion (his kind, anyway) and evolution. He has a quite accurate letter in today’s Nature. Since that is behind a paywall, I have… 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.