: Nearktis, Neotropis etc.

[Allan Shanfield]

Your contentions are interesting. Does this (or are there sources ) that
refute Raven and Axelrod's work in 1974 that took many families on a
case-by-case basis and interpreted them as "gondwanan", "Laurasian", etc?
I'd appreciate any salient references.

Allan Shanfield

UC Davis

>
> I would venture, with all due respect to those (the great majority?)  who
> believe otherwise, that all of these so-called zoogeographic areas -
> Palearctic, Nearctic, Neotropical, are not worth anything so far as
> biogeographic classification is concerned.
> They are all geopolitical areas that lack any uniquely defining feature in
> terms of their
> boundary limits or inclusiveness of taxa. In other words, they are
> arbitrary, and
> have no real existence as natural units of evolution. One might as well say
> "North merica" or "South America", "Eurasia," "Laurasia," etc - all equally
> arbitrary
> in this context.
>
> John Grehan
>