That’s because you only read the abstract, which is talking about Alcidae as a whole, not the particular divergence between the great auk and the razorbill, Pinguinus and Alce. You have to look at Figure 2. Ironically, if as you have previously claimed, the fossil record is complete, since the oldest fossil of Pinguinus is only around 5 million years old you should place the evolution of this new body plan even later; otherwise you have to postulate a ghost lineage, and I know you refuse to do that.
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How do you determine who is reliable or not?
For instance you’ve already overestimated Axe’s expertise and relevance in his field, which suggests more than a little bias at work here.
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This, and I suppose he can correct me, if I misunderstood him, may be what John Mercer means when he says that Lee and users like him are mistaking claims for data. Indeed we cannot, and nor is it expected that we would, replicate each and every experimental study in our own lab before we come to trust a publication in a prestigious journal. Certainly doing the same statistical analyses on publicly available data sets such as, say, genomes, is within the grasp of even the unlearned, but that in its own right requires a degree of trust in the correctness of the sequence published, and is at any rate an exception very specific to the sort of studies done on data sets like this, and does not apply generally to all of science.
Expertise in a field of science does not begin nor end with mere literacy. Keeping an enormous list of references does not make one a scholar, and, for that matter, having sparse knowledge or recollection of a field’s history does not make one unqualified in principle to comment. Of course one gets to cite previously published results, even those one had no part in producing, and one is not an inferior researcher for relying where applicable on the work of one’s peers. However, as we do our own studies, as we collect and review data, we obtain an appreciation for the methods employed for this, and for the mistakes that can happen at various steps in the process. By “looking at the data” – not replicating every study, but even just by doing our own – we develop a sense for what works, what does not, and why. And though we may end up approving of ultimately erroneous results occasionally, whilst at times also rejecting broadly unproblematic drafts, each folly is a far cry from having zero clue whatsoever, much less from arrogantly insisting that the whole paradigm needs an overturning for it. To put in the work does not mean re-building all the giants whose proverbial shoulders we stand on, but rather it means seeing some of the data, enough to legitimately count oneself among the ‘peers’ one swaps works between for review, and enough to grow an intuition for what sounds plausible and what does not, that is any more reliable than a coin flip.
The error people like Lee make in “only looking at the paper, not the data” is not that they specifically have not replicated what ever study they cite. It is rather that they take very strong positions, often times against the consensus and even against the positions of the authors they cite, without ever having reviewed any data pertaining to the field. They invested so little of their time and effort into studying the topic that they are entirely unable to tell what even is a reliable source, let alone the meaning of the things it says. They have no clue even of how much there is to have a clue of, and yet they issue “challenges” as if anyone’s time was well spent attempting to satisfy their untrained intellects. The citation to them ultimately comes down to a mere rhetorical token, just words to be played in the debate-game, because of how profoundly unfamiliar they are with – and thereby disrespectful of – any of the actual real work (the “data”, as it were) that went into writing those words to begin with.
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