More on human-orangutan analysis

[John Grehan]

I've belatedly realized that there is one published cladistic analysis of
morphological characters that supported the Human-orangutan and
chimp-gorilla clades. This was a study by Collard and Wood (2000) in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA). Sounds good you
might think? Not according to Collard and Wood. They had already decided
that the molecular phylogeny is the only truth and any morphological
studies not conforming to the molecular tree is wrong and the characters
are uninformative.

The irony of this study is that the 'method' employed by these authors
invalidated their enterprise from the beginning since they started with the
premise that morphology is, of itself, uninformative. So they wasted not
only their own time and money, but that of the institutions from which they
accessed specimens and resources of the Natural Environmental Research
Council and Wellcome Trust, Leverhulme Trust and Henry Luce Foundation that
provided financial support for what appears to be, from the perspective of
the authors, a pointless exercise.

John Grehan

Dr. John Grehan
Director of Science and Collections
Buffalo Museum of Science
1020 Humboldt Parkway
Buffalo, New York 14211-1293
Voice 716-896-5200 x372
Fax 716-897-6723
jgrehan at sciencebuff.org
http://www.sciencebuff.org/biogeography/Panbiogeography/Panbiogeography-Gate.htm
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