birding-aus

Rheindt and Austin

To:
Subject: Rheindt and Austin
From: "Frank Rheindt" <>
Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2005 06:09:06 +0200
Dear Mr Penhallurick, (cc to Birding-AUS)

just read your message to Birding-AUS indicating that you will soon be publishing a "reply to our reply" in the next Emu. It's good to hear that you followed up and improved on those analyses, and it's even better to hear that many of your results continue to stand up.

After our reply had been published in Emu, I have seen various emails on mailing-lists such as Birding-NZ that were overly sympathetic to our criticism of your dataset, stating things like: "...so all those results [of Penhallurick and Wink's] were wrong after all...". I have replied to one of those emails in public and have emphasized what Jeremy Austin and I had been asserting all along, namely that many of your taxonomic re-arrangements that we criticized as being prone to analytical short-comings (but not those that suffered from conceptual short-comings) may prove correct in the end, and that your dataset contains many hints at some of those re-arrangements, but that the data are not conclusive enough just yet to warrant changing the taxonomic status-quo. I am waiting with great anticipation for your revised analyses, which will hopefully show that some (or most) of those re-arrangements are valid after all. Please be re-assured that I will be more than happy to concede that some of your initial analyses proved right in the end, once I see the proper analyses done. I will even do so with great joy, because - as yourself - I am also one of those people who are intrigued by the advances of our knowledge in bird systematics, and I also find few other things as fascinating as bird taxonomy.

I should stress that the above-mentioned concessions would probably not refer to those parts of your publication that pertain to your application of the Biological Species Concept and your lumping of various good biological species. I maintain that there would always remain insurmountable differences between our different applications of this species concept, no matter how rigorous your new data turn out to be.

Though Jeremy and I certainly thought about contacting you before submission of our reply, the reason why we failed to do so is because we deemed the matter one of wide public interest. Even if we had resolved differences between our own view-points in private, public discrepancies would have lingered, and we wished to address those in our reply. We knew that Emu - in the tradition of good scientific discourse - would grant you the opportunity to respond to our reply, which you chose to do. By no means did we intend to initiate a personal feud, and personally I certainly do not harbor any negative sentiments. Quite to the contrary, I respect the great work you're doing for avian taxonomy on your public website, and I have myself resorted to it on more than one occasion.

Suffice it to say, your new and improved analyses will doubtless remove some of the initial discrepancies and will hopefully vindicate you on some of the counts that we deemed your results premature. However, I am saying this only with regards to the "analytical short-comings" pointed out in our reply. Other issues (which we termed conceptual short-comings) will certainly remain, no matter how much data are added, because they are based not on a lack of data, but on one's perception of how biodiversity is arranged around us. It will therefore remain contentious whether the albatross papers cited by us are immaterial to this discussion (as you assert), or whether they are indeed of relevance (as pointed out by us).

It is my wish that people from many different schools of thought continue the dialogue about these matters in a scientifically informed yet congenial fashion. Life is too short for personal feuds.

Your sincerely,

Frank


---------------------------------------------
============Frank E. RHEINDT================

DEPARTMENT OF GENETICS
University of Melbourne

OFFICE ADDRESS:
Museum Victoria - Sciences Department
Melbourne Museum
11 Nicholson Street
Carlton 3053
Melbourne VIC
Australia

=============================================


--------------------------------------------
Birding-Aus is now on the Web at
www.birding-aus.org
--------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the message 'unsubscribe
birding-aus' (no quotes, no Subject line)
to 

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>
Admin

The University of NSW School of Computer and Engineering takes no responsibility for the contents of this archive. It is purely a compilation of material sent by many people to the birding-aus mailing list. It has not been checked for accuracy nor its content verified in any way. If you wish to get material removed from the archive or have other queries about the archive e-mail Andrew Taylor at this address: andrewt@cse.unsw.EDU.AU