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
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