[Taxacom] Biogeographical reasoning

[Bob Mesibov]

Ken Kinman wrote:

"Either vicariance by land or dispersal by sea or air.  Are there any other 
possibilities?  I can't thing of any.  So dispersal is the only probable 
alternative to vicariance from my perspective."

I hear a warning bell ringing. Isn't this the argumentum ad ignorantium, 
i.e. "I can't think of any other possibility, so the non-excluded 
possibility must be the answer". [Didn't that idiot von Daniken use this 
argument repeatedly? "Primitive peoples couldn't have built these huge stone 
monuments by themselves, so aliens from an advanced civilisation must have 
helped them. How else could they have been built?"]

Biogeographers 100 years ago didn't have the possibility of mobile terranes. 
Orthodox evolutionists 50 years ago didn't have the possibility of sympatric 
speciation, apart from polyploidy in higher plants. What possibilities are 
we failing to imagine today?
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Dr Robert Mesibov
Honorary Research Associate, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery
and School of Zoology, University of Tasmania
Home contact: PO Box 101, Penguin, Tasmania, Australia 7316
(03) 64371195; 61 3 64371195

Australian Millipedes Checklist
http://www.qvmag.tas.gov.au/zoology/millipedes/index.html
Tasmanian Multipedes
http://www.qvmag.tas.gov.au/zoology/multipedes/mulintro.html
Spatial data basics for Tasmania
http://www.utas.edu.au/spatial/locations/index.html
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