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
Epistemology 50 words for snow 6: constructing phenomena 11 Dec 20171 Mar 2019 Series Conceptual confusion The economics of cultural categories What are phenomena? What counts as sociocultural? Species Constructing phenomena Explanations and phenomena There is a naive empiricist view held by nobody on close inspection, that phenomena merely present themselves to the observer, and call for explanation. At least since Kant, such… Read More
Ecology and Biodiversity Modelling and ecological niches 2 Jul 2009 Overlooked due to the orang paper in the Journal of Biogeography is a simulation of the effects of global warming on Bigfoot distributions. It turns out that Sasquatch will become more widespread due to global warming… Late note: John Dennehy also has a nice piece on this paper. Read More
Book Darwin as a historiographer 9 Nov 200818 Sep 2017 I was very pleased to receive today my copy of this book: A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography, edited by A. Tucker. Chichester UK: Wiley-Blackwell. I got it because on pp 405-415 is my essay “Darwin”, which I am rather proud of. I have long thought that… 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.