Daniel Smith
Posts: 970
Joined: Sep. 2007
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| Quote (W. Kevin Vicklund @ Oct. 23 2007,15:01) | Your claims as to what Bowen and Avise wrote are rather... odd. Let me guess: you read the abstract, but did not actually read the paper, which is freely avaible from the link you provided. This is extremely dishonest for anyone who claims to be interested in the evidence.
First, the hypothesized isolation was 40 million years or longer, rather than 60-80 million years. While this is certainly nitpicking on my part (since 60-80 million years is longer than 40), it suggests that you didn't read the paper - very poor scholarship indeed. But this is merely a semantic error. Your other errors are much worse. For example, the study included a Pacific colony as an outgroup. The Pacific isolation only occured 3 million years ago (as you yourself noted), yet the Pacific colony showed more changes than the putative 40 million year separation! Another major error is that you claim they postulated these populations interbred. This is not quite true - they considered and mostly rejected it, and gave reasons for that rejection. Rather, they postulated that it was the result of a recent colonization event, and that these events occur periodically. Bonus question: what is their explanation for why and how periodic colonization events occur? Finally, you claim that sea turtles have never been observed to change nesting sites. Yet the paper clearly identifies several instances of this occuring - in the same paragraph they largely rejected the interbreeding argument.
I highly recommend that in the future you read your sources before citing them, if at all possible. It will help prevent you from making such egregious errors. Unfortunately, some people never do learn this lesson, and I enjoy rubbing their face in it after the first few times they make that error. Of course, not all articles are free, and you might find yourself taking a calculated risk to make a point. Just be prepared for the fall-out if your interpretation of the abstract is incorrect.
For now, I will assume poor scholarship on your part, rather than deliberate dishonesty. Keep it up, though, and you will soon find yourself being called a pubjacker. |
You are right. I did not read the paper. My source was a book I've been reading called "Patterns in Evolution" by Roger Lewin. I decided that it would be better to try to find a link when I posted it; so I found the abstract and just linked to it.
Now that I've read the paper, I see that it's not exactly what I characterized it to be. I was however, struck by their hypothesis that sea turtles do not accumulate mutations in their mitochondrial DNA as fast as they had expected - and even the 3 million year Atlantic/Pacific separation produced far less variation than the 2% per million years that has generally been accepted.
I must say also here that I've been a bit presumptuous in declaring my "hypothesis" - since (as I said when I first arrived here) my ideas are still in development. My main goal is to find out what really happened. I will go wherever the data leads. So I don't really have a hypothesis that's set in stone. I have more in the way of expectations due to my variant interpretation of the data.
One thing I've learned recently (from the same book) is that; even among interbreeding populations, sequence divergence can vary widely (one study found a species of skink with an 8% divergence and a subwren species with 0.1% sequence divergence in the same Australian environment).
This has led me to re-evaluate my views.
I'm thinking that perhaps these divergence percentages correlate to Schindewolf's proposed three-stage evolutionary theory; with the "typolosis" (or degenerative, over-specialized) phase corresponding to the species with the lowest sequence diversity.
I'll have to do more study.
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"If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance." Orville Wright
"The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question." Richard Dawkins
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