[Taxacom] RES: south-west Australia

[Michael Heads]

Hi Curtis,
 
Panbiogeography has developed many new or unusual concepts for old ideas and terms, e.g. evolution, origin, species, dispersal, ancestor etc. These new concepts are clarified in the panbiogeographic literature, and may often be confusing if you haven't read it. For example, the concept 'species', as used by many biologists, is the 'absolute' concept of Mayr - species are real, subgenera and subspecies are not. 'The species' is the basis of evolutionary theory, biodiversity assesment and so on. Panbiogeography instead used the Darwinian, relativistic concept -  a species is not special, and is just the unit between subspecies and subgenera. Geneticists who work on speciation are now starting to use this and to question why Mayr etc. were so antidarwinian (see the outstanding article: Mallet, J. 2010. Why was Darwin's view of species rejected by twentieth century biologists? Biol. Philos. 25: 497).
 
Michael   

Wellington, New Zealand.

My papers on biogeography are at: http://tiny.cc/RiUE0

--- On Fri, 24/6/11, Curtis Clark <lists at curtisclark.org> wrote:


From: Curtis Clark <lists at curtisclark.org>
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] RES: south-west Australia
To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu, Robinwbruce at aol.com, jgrehan at sciencebuff.org
Received: Friday, 24 June, 2011, 4:58 PM


On 6/22/2011 9:35 PM, Michael Heads wrote:
> You can use it in any of the standard ways and people will know what you mean from the context.
How did Robin mean it? How did John mean "null hypothesis"?

Panbiogeography can only seem esoteric, and subject to marginalization, 
if it uses technical terms commonly used by other biologists, but with 
different meanings, and without the differences being clarified. It's 
easy for the rest of us to assume "track", for example, to be a 
specialized term in panbiogeography, since it has a multiplicity of 
meanings in standard English, but most of us with a biometrics 
background would assume we know what "degrees of freedom" and "null 
hypothesis" mean, and would only be puzzled, and I admit put off, by 
what would seem to be redefinitions.

-- 
--
Curtis Clark
Cal Poly Pomona


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