Panbiogeography of the Americas

[Frederick W. Schueler]

Fred Rickson wrote:
>
> I wrote:
> >
> > >Fred R. Rickson wrote:
> > >
> > > >You just don't put dots on a map, draw connecting lines,
> > > > 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.


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

* I wasn't concerned with Croizat's conclusions, just with the idea that
tracks weren't a suitable way of scientifically dealing with
distributions. A lot of early Mendelians stated that their theory had
implications for evolution that later proved both unfounded and rash, but
that doesn't mean that their method wasn't going to prove suitable for
studying ecological genetics and micro-evolution.

fred schueler.
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