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Posted by Frank Burbrink on October 18, 2001 at 00:00:19:
In Reply to: Re: New Taxonomy of the Elaphe obsoleta complex posted by WW on October 17, 2001 at 07:53:17:
If you are going to comment on my paper, then you should read it correctly. I only threw out subspecific intermediates in the subspecific analyses...not in the grand analyses. I did this to give the subspecies a fair shake. That is, an attempt was made to try to clearly seperate all subspecies using multivariate statistics. How could I name suspected intermediates in these analyses? I was trying to give subspecies the benefit of the doubt by using specimens that could clearly be defined as one subspecies or another. Intermediates would have confounded that situation. So, the old subspecies did not work very well multivariately or using the color patterns defined for them. Often, individuals with one subspecific color pattern were found deep within the ranges of specimens displaying other color patterns. So, how useful are these subspecies if they cannot be defined using the characters originally described for them, or morphologicaly using whole host of other characters? Moreover, they do not form molecular lineages?
Please note that I used all specimens in the other analyses (Cases 1-4).
Color pattern was indeed used in the other analyses. Color pattern does support the three mtDNA clades to some degree.
Also, you should pay attention to a paper coming out in Sys. Bio. next year by Wiens and Penkrot that provide rules for naming mtDNA clades. Because mtDNA is inherited maternally, it evolves at 4 times the rate of nuclear genes. This makes mtDNA genes very useful in determining lineages of newly split organisms.
Frank Burbrink
