Creationism: This time it's personal

[John_Harshman]

I happened to encounter an article on the creationist web site Evolution News & Science Today (4 years old, but whatever) that cites me. That’s the personal part. What annoys me most is that my research is being used to cast doubt on phylogenetics and on common descent itself. But of course I’m not the only source being misused here. The author is Gunter Bechly, who should, one imagines, know better. But apparently he does not. Here:

Rafting Stormy Waters: When Biogeography Contradicts Common Ancestry |...

The subject is biogeography and its support or lack thereof for common descent. In large part, it’s a criticism of the “rafting” hypothesis to explain the geographic distributions of various taxa, but there are other examples, such as the one involving me. Here’s the big quote:

Ratite Birds

An iconic example of disjunct distribution is that of ratite birds. These include very large flightless birds like the African ostriches, the extinct elephant birds from Madagascar, the South American rheas, the Australian emus, the cassowaries from Australasia, and kiwis and the extinct moas from New Zealand. Most biologists assumed that ratites are monophyletic and originated from a common flightless ancestor, and that their disjunct distribution is explained by the breakup of the ancient southern supercontinent Gondwana. Unfortunately, a few problems spoil this delightful just-so story:

1. Moas do not seem to be more closely related to the New Zealand kiwis (Cooper et al. 2001, Haddrath & Baker 2001).
2. Instead, the elephant birds of Madagascar are claimed to be the closest relatives of the New Zealand kiwis (Mitchell et al. 2014).
3. The breakup of Gondwana is much too long ago to explain the distribution of ratite birds by continental drift (vicariance biogeography), which cannot have originated before the Paleogene according to fossil and molecular clock evidence (Prum et al. 2015).

But wait, there is help from cladistics: Just shake the tree and reshuffle the taxa, so that all the ostrich-like birds could have evolved independently by multiple convergence from flying ancestors, and their biogeographic distribution could thus be due to normal aerial dispersal. This was suggested by the genomic study of Harshman et al. (2008), who found the flying tinamous to be nested within flightless ratite birds. This is, of course, contradicted by many morphological characters that unite all ratites, as well as by molecular data, and Harshman even mentions five recent studies that strongly supported ratite monophyly. These conflicting data were ignored in Harshman’s DNA study that was crafted by not fewer than 19 co-authors. Certainly the new molecular tree must be so robust that the new molecular evidence outweighs the conflicting evidence. Except that that is not the case: indeed Harshman et al. (2008) presented two very different trees, one in which tinamous are closer to rheas, and one in which they are closer to cassowaries, emus, and kiwis. But who cares? At least we got rid of an inconvenient biogeographical problem.

Unfortunately, there is more: In a study, Haddrath & Baker (2012) confirmed that tinamous nest within ratites, but now they are more closesy related to the extinct moas, while rheas are closer to kiwis, cassowaries, and emus. Certainly, now we’ve got it right, at least till the next study with other genes, like that of Smith et al. (2013), who again got two different results for the position of tinamous like Harshman et al. (2008). Meanwhile a new study by Baker et al. (2014) vindicated the result of Haddrath & Baker (2012) (note that Scherz 2013 disputed all the alleged evidence for a position of tinamous within ratites). Isn’t phylogenetic tree reconstruction a wonderful science?

The attempt here is less about biogeography than about the uselessness of phylogenetics. In the process it dishonestly emphasizes differences among studies, all involving disagreements without strong support from the data, and in fact agreement among analyses is much greater than claimed, and increasingly certain as data increase. Shall I also point out that Harshman et al. (2008) did not in fact present two very different trees, but two trees identical except for a slightly different resolution of one very short branch?

So, given that phylogenetics is useless and biogeography contradicts common descent, or so we are told, what is the alternative? As usual, not much is said. Here it is, such as it is:

In all these examples a polyphyletic view much better agrees with the empirical evidence than does universal common descent.

What is “a polyphyletic view”? That isn’t entirely clear. Given that Bechly is a saltationist, he may be claiming that vaguely similar ancestral populations in different areas were quickly transformed in convergent ways, morphologically and genetically, to produce similar but unrelated descendants. Perhaps, for example, the most famous case, Old World vs. New World monkeys, results from the independent transformation of unrelated species, say an early simian in the Old World and some marsupial (?) in the New, into monkey-like animals. I say “perhaps” because Bechly offers nothing more than that one sentence in explanation.

Bechly does have one point: rafting is an unsatisfying explanation for long-distance separation of related taxa. One wonders if there is a better one, though Bechly seems uninterested in what it might be. And nothing excuses his wholesale distortion of the science of phylogeny.

[Puck_Mendelssohn]

Well, as we already know from his own statements, Bechly dislikes you:

This forum is dominated mainly by the very same group of hardcore anti-ID activists (such as Joe Felsenstein, John Harshman, Arthur Hunt, Puck Mendelssohn, and “Rumraket”) who are notorious for their vitriolic attacks against intelligent design proponents at other Darwinist forums like Panda’s Thumb .

This wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen legitimate science cited with malice aforethought: disparaging and/or misusing legitimate scholarship by people with known anti-IDC views. Wells did something like that in his weird “whales can’t have evolved” argument which the DI made into a video some time back. There was a paper by Durrett and Schmidt rebutting one of Behe’s contentions, which Wells then mischaracterized to make it sound as though it showed that evolution is too slow to account for whales arising from their land-based ancestors. Rebut the DI, and you’ll find yourself being cited by 'em.

In the Wells case, just as in your experience with Bechly, I really think that it is very important to recognize that these efforts on the part of IDCers are just raw dishonesty. There really is no possibility that they are this dim.