Troy wrote:
"Why should I bother to indulge you with a "just-so" story? You asserted that ALL alterna have a silvery gray iris. I demonstrated that you were wrong. End of story. You were wrong, admit it."

What we have, finally, is an admission from Troy that he has no explanation of how the silvery gray iris has become a universal trait in Lampropeltis alterna. He has no explanation to account for the replacement of the ancestral golden brown iris by the silvery gray iris in L. alterna. That is because his theory that L. alterna never changed even though its environment changed from woodland to desert since the end of the last ice age cannot explain this fact.

What does one do when one has no explanation for known facts? That is easy for some: dismiss the facts. Troy claims that L. alterna does NOT have a silvery gray iris by showing that one snake, out of the thousands of known specimens, lacks the silvery gray iris. So, he found a photograph of a single snake of unknown origin and claims that this snake proves me wrong because it does not have a silvery gray iris. Even if this specimen is a wild caught L. alterna, and even if it does not have a silvery gray iris, it proves nothing.

I dealt fully with what such a specimen would mean in my previous post, and shows that this single specimen, even if it is authentic, does nothing to change the fact that the silvery gray iris has replaced the golden brown iris and that L. alterna has replaced the ancestral L. mexicana in Texas because west Texas has turned into desert. Troy has no response to my arguments.

Troy's "response" instead is to deny yet another fact. He is claiming once again that West Texas is not a desert. That seems to be something that the animals and plants living in West Texas are unaware of. The plants and animals living there are characteristic of desert environments, and this very simple fact has enabled biologists to call West Texas part of the Chihuahuan Desert. There is even a Chihuahuan Desert Research Institute in West Texas studying the desert biota that exist there. Perhaps Troy should take the people who run this institute to court and make them change the name of this institute to the Chihuahuan Woodland Research Institute, because according to Troy, the Chihuahuan Desert does not exist in Texas.

It is obvious that Troy cannot explain how the silvery gray iris originated in L. alterna, and it is obvious that he cannot explain why L. mexicana no longer lives in Texas or why L. mexicana fails to intergrade with L. alterna. It is obvious that he refuses to accept my theory, which does provide plausible explanations for each of these facts. Therefore Troy has resorted to dismissing the facts that he cannot explain.

The fact that there is no published report of L. alterna without a silvery gray iris calls into question the authenticity of Troy's photograph. If he is willing to back up his claim, he should publish his finding in a scientific journal. I am sure that he will have no problem finding an editor willing to publish it, provided that it is factual piece of information.

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