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
Creationism and Intelligent Design Objecting to the prevailing tide 12 Jun 2009 My friend and costudent of Gareth Nelson, Malte Ebach, persists in his campaign to bring some clarity to evolutionary and systematics thinking. I may not always agree with him, but he’s often clearer on these matters than his targets, so I refer you to his recent post on paraphyletic thinking…. Read More
Evolution Myths about Darwin 10 Feb 200918 Sep 2017 We are going to hear a lot about Darwin this year, especially this month for his birthday (happy 200th, Chas. You don’t look a day over 150) and in November for the sesquicentenary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. And you will hear or read repetitions of… Read More
Administrative News from Ediacara 27 Oct 2008 The Ediacaran period is the era between around 635Mybp and 540Mybp, just before the Cambrian. You pronounce it “ed-ee-ack-a-ran”. It is also the name of a new blog by the inimitable Chris Nedin, erstwhile paleontologist who specialised in the Ediacaran fauna before joining the Dark Side (federal public service) in… 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.