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 You and me, baby, ain't nothing but mammals 7 Apr 2010 The song of the title of this post is a catchy and highly amusing piece that suggests that if we’re just mammals we should have sex. It’s sort of a low brow version of Andrew Marvell’s To his coy mistress. Instead of Time’s wingéd chariot, we should do what mammals… Read More
Biology My latest paper 4 Jul 2010 I have just had a paper published: “What is a species? Essences and generation” Theory in Biosciences Volume 129, Numbers 2-3 / September, 2010. Pages 141-148 . DOI 10.1007/s12064-010-0090-z Abstract: Arguments against essentialism in biology rely strongly on a claim that modern biology abandoned Aristotle’s notion of a species as… Read More
Ecology and Biodiversity New paper on polyploid speciation 27 Aug 2009 For a long time now, people have known of speciation by the multiplication of chromosomes (polyploidy), either of one’s own chromosomes (autopolyploidy) or by doubling a mismatched set from some other species’ chromosomes (allopolyploidy) to even up the numbers and gene complements. Some have thought this to be an uninteresting… 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.