Farewell to species - reticulation

[Curtis Clark]

At 01:20 PM 00.02.02 +0100, Pierre Deleporte wrote:
>I did see such reticulate cladograms, they are produced by the CTA program
>of John Alroy (1995, Syst. Biol. 44, 152-178), which precisely implements
>the idea of Nelson 1983 (check for single hybridization events resolving
>many "scattered similarities" into homologies... correct, Curtis?).

I have the volume sitting on a shelf, but never read it. My own work is
with recently formed species of hybrid origin, where there are other lines
of evidence (intermediacy, agreement with F1s--neither of which is
foolproof) in addition to the distribution of apomorphies. I think the real
issue is ancient hybridization, where the traces aren't so easy to discern.

>But the fact
>is that this field of investigation still receives little attention,
except
>perhaps by botanists who can identify hybrids in the caryotypes.

No always--homoploid hybrid species abound.

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