Systematics and Biogeography blog 23 Oct 2007 The estimable Drs David Williams and Malte Ebach have started a blog on Systematics and Biogeography, which supports a recent book they haven’t sent me a free copy of yet. Expect much puncturing of pretensions and orthodoxies. Book Ecology and Biodiversity Evolution Species and systematics
Biology Ranking 24 Aug 2010 A diversion in the natural classification series. In natural classification, we typically do not find that patterns due to the process of historical causation come arrayed neatly in boxes within boxes, and yet one of the most common temptations is for classifiers to set up fixed ranks. The Linnaean scheme… Read More
Administrative Travel Diary 13: Berkeley talk 6 Nov 2009 Well, yet again I have utterly utterly failed to embarrass my university by making an idiot of myself in public. In short, the talk (on the Essentialism Myth) to the Vertebrate Zoology crowd at Berkeley went very well I am told. I believe them because instead of sending me on… Read More
Evolution The cultural canoe 19 Feb 200818 Sep 2017 A new paper, unfortunately not yet available to nonsubscribers on PNAS‘s Early Edition, has done some remarkable work on the evolution of canoe designs, putting some meat onto cultural evolutionary models. Read More
Read through the posted link. Very interesting. Having been an aspiring paleontologist up throught the MS, I think this business of dating lineages based on fossils is pretty scary. Fortunately the group I have done the most systematic work on, the family Rivulidae of the Aplocheiloid killifishes, have, so far as I know, no fossil representatives. There have been two independent DNA trees done for the Aplocheiloids, and they are similar enought that we might actually know something. When relationships and distributions are compared to continental drift maps, one feels pretty confident as to what the vicariant events were. So we can date the vicariant events based on geological, but nonfossil, information. We have revised one Rivulid genus based on DNA. The sequence of speciation events and the geological history of that part of South America correlate very nicely. Talking around, workers in other fish groups are coming up with the same sort of scenario. If all this is so, the modern bony fishes originated earlier than we have thought, and diversification was rapid early on.