BGF and Troy h do have a lot in common. They are both quite stubborn. WW is a little more reasonable. For example, he no longer insists that Elaphe is polyphyletic since I showed lots of evidence that it is paraphyletic, meaning that the species in this genus share a common ancestor after all. WW has generally stayed away from the arguments between BGF and I, probably because he has little say in most of the papers in which BGF is the senior author. The medical definition of venom that BGF, who has a background in medicine, is using may be his own, with little input from WW. BGF simply stubbornly refuses to accept the mountain of opposing evidence that argues against his theory that the last common ancestor of the colubroid snakes is venomous.



Of course troy h simply refuses to accept my theory, supported by scientific evidence, that Lampropeltis alterna evolved only recently, since the end of the last ice age, when the Chihuahuan Desert formed. Troy h is denying facts. He denies that L. alterna is adapted to the desert, that the Chihuahuan Desert is even a desert (since it averages more than ten inches of rainfall annually according to him). He is also ignoring the immunological data of Maxson and Dowling because he claims that immunological data is distance data. Being someone who adheres to cladistic dogma, he is perhaps supposed to reject distance data automatically regardless of merit. Well, distance data is nevertheless scientific data. It cannot be used to define taxa, but it definitely can inform us when a species last shared a common ancestor with another species. The close immunological distance between L. alterna and L. calligaster suggests that they last shared a common ancestor sometime in the mid to late Pleistocene. The lack of L. alterna characters (such as the silvery gray iris) in L. calligaster is strong evidence that the L. alterna-mexicana split occurred after the L. calligaster-L. alterna split. That means at the time L. calligaster evolved from an L. alterna-like ancestor, the defining characters of L. alterna has not evolved yet. It means L. alterna was still morphologically indistinguishable from L. mexicana at the time that L. calligaster budded off of it. L. alterna therefore must have evolved after the mid to late Pleistocene, which is the time frame of the L. alterna-calligaster split. Since it is adapted to the Chihuahuan Desert, it most likely evolved at the end of the Pleistocene.



Problem solved; debate continues for the dogmatic who refuse to admit they are wrong even in the face of opposing evidence. I submit that troy h's assertions and his belief are often independent of scientific evidence.

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