Just about everyone these days uses fossils to calibrate molecular divergence. Fossils only provide minimum ages, but these are magically transmogrified into actual or maximal dates that are supposed to falsify earlier origins supported by tectonic methods. Ancestral area analysis can generate chance dispersal for patterns that could just as well be the result of vicariance. Ancestral area analysis uses areas that have no emperical existence. Its all a bit like following Alice down the rabbit hole. Numbers or not, nonsense is still nonsense.
Andrew Paul McKenzie Pegman Exactly! At least you are not a practitioner of the methods. But there are plenty who are (and tons of funding) and I was interested to see if anyone out there might try to defend what I view as nonsense (because of the issues outlined). Its indefensibility may be why some prominent NZ practitioners chose to call of suppression of competing research programs rather than provide effective defense of their own.
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