[Taxacom] Snake garbage

[John Grehan]

I wrote the original note in a bit of a hurry (should not do that) and
quite justifiably got castigated off list for not making sense. So below a
hopefully more coherent rant.

This paper carries on the time honored scientific tradition of just
ignoring shortcomings of a method and ploughing on as if the ground was not
already falling away beneath. In this case the paper does this by
representing priors as some kind of empirically real source of estimating
fossil calibrated clade ages whereas it has been shown that fossil
calibrated ages cannot be anything but a minimum ages. Priors are just
personal guesses about how much older than the older fossil a taxon might
be (dressed up in numbers to look scientific). These authors just ignore
that. And they continue the temptation of using an automated biogeography
program as 'evidence' despite its inherent inability to distinguish between
vicariance and dispersal where either can generate the same biogeographic
pattern. In other words, they use a plug and play program that can render
artificial results and they have no way to know. But the authors carry on
the pretense that this is not the case.

Cheers, John

On Fri, Sep 17, 2021 at 10:20 AM John Grehan <calabar.john at gmail.com> wrote:

> "Evolution and dispersal of snakes across the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass
> extinction" (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25136-y.pdf )
>
> This paper carries on the time honored scientific tradition of just
> ignoring shortcomings of a method and ploughing on as if the ground was not
> already falling away beneath. In this case the representation or priors as
> some kind of empirically real source of estimating fossil calibrated clade
> ages as anything but a minimum ages, and the continued temptation of using
> an automated biogeography program as 'evidence' despite its
> inherent inability to distinguish between vicariance and dispersal where
> either can generate the same biogeographic pattern. I have been attacked
> for calling this stuff 'garbage' but I have not come up with a more
> accurate term - yet.
>
> John Grehan
>