Are you guys talking about Richard Wells? I don't know if he is considered a professional or not but he seems to be pretty angry because I refuted his claim that molecular systematics is a theory and thus not reliable. I guess different people manage their anger differently. Wells is telling a fictional story to vent his anger apparently.



Not too long ago, a pharmacologist who apparently has little training in evolutionary biology got pretty upset because I cited references to show that he was using a pharmacological, but not a biological definition of venom. I also showed that his claim that "venom" evolved in the ancestor of the Colubroidea makes absolutely no sense because it would require massive numbers of independent losses of an adaptive feature in the colubroid snakes.



I imagine too that WW is at least slightly angry because I demonstrated that his adherence to cladistic classificatory philosophy is, in the words of Ernst Mayr and Peter Ashlock, "impractical, destructive and scientifically untenable." By recognizing only holophyletic taxa and disqualifying paraphyletic taxa, WW has embraced a taxonomic practice that will result in either excessive splitting or excessive lumping. It is no accident that he has supported both of these practices. For example, he supports Utiger et al.'s excessive splitting of the genus Elaphe and at the same time he also supported Kluge's excessive lumping of Morelia and Chondropython. WW has no defense for his own taxonomic philosophy. It is certainly fashionable to be a cladist and to be part of the crusade to disqualify paraphyletic taxa. Even though following trends blindly may be what many scientists do in real life, but it is not what a scientist is expected to do if he/she is an independent thinker. There is safety in numbers being part of a flock of starlings. The truly outstanding scientists, like Galileo, fly alone, like eagles.



I believe that good philosophers, like eagles, fly alone, not in flocks like starlings.--Galileo

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