Panbiogeography of the Americas

[Fred Rickson]

----------
> From: Frederick W. Schueler <bckcdb at ISTAR.CA>
> To: TAXACOM at USOBI.ORG
> Subject: Re: Panbiogeography of the Americas
> Date: Tuesday, September 28, 1999 10:13 AM
>
> >Fred R. Rickson wrote:
>
> >
> > >You just don't put dots on a map, draw connecting lines,
> > > and then hypothesize interconnecting land bridges and call it valid
> > >science.
>
> * if your system of connecting lines is entrained in a system
> that encodes them as a falsifiable hypothesis, then that sounds like
> science to me. Just because 'land bridges' turn out to be continental
> rafting doesn't influence the geographic reality of the connections they
> describe.
>
> fred schueler.
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>          Eastern    Ontario    Biodiversity    Museum
>                 Grenville Co, Ontario, Canada
> (RR#2 Oxford Station, K0G 1T0) (613)258-3107   bckcdb at istar.ca
> ------------------------------------------------------------

Frederick,

Please entrain, for me, data which connects the Hawaiian Islands to the
U.S. west coast via a land bridge...Croizat had no problem imagining this.
Obviously continental rafting is responsible for a lot of currently
disconnected distribution.  The problem seems to be that Croizat seemed to
think just about anything (maybe all) might be explained by vicarience.
Panbiogeography today, is, correctly, a lot less ridged, and my argument is
with thinking that everything Croizat wrote is defendable.  A lot of it is
not.

Fred R. Rickson
Professor of Botany
Department of Botany
Oregon State University
Corvallis, Oregon
USA  97331

Tel: (541) 737-5272
Fax: (541) 737-3573
email: ricksonf at bcc.orst.edu