[Taxacom] Position Announcement

[Richard Pyle]

Hi John,

Even though I quietly root for you from the sidelines in your campaign of
"molecules don't tell the whole story" (or, as I would put it "we don't know
enough about molecules yet to read the whole story from them"); in the
interest of fairness, I have to ask in the context of your comment:

> Presumably not just from the molecular perspective?

If the position announcement was for a morphological phylogeneticist, would
you also jump in and comment, "Presumably not just from the morphological
perspective?" My hunch is, you would probably not (indeed, I bet you'd get
your pom-poms out the way I sometimes do on this list).

I don't know why I'm writing this -- maybe just a bit ornery from
insufficient sleep last night.  But I guess my point is that the same
rationale that would cause one to presume "not just" one line of evidence
should work both ways.  Personally, I have no problem with studies that
involve only one kind of evidence or the other -- as long as the conclusions
recognize the limitations.  Studies that involve a concordance of both kinds
of evidence are better, of course (well...usually, anyway...) -- but if
you're going to condone studies involving only one kind of evidence, you
should also be prepared to condone those involving only the other kind of
evidence.

Cantankerous from Kaneohe,
Rich