An ontological dilemma: epistemology and methodology of historical biogeography

Abstract

The task of historical biogeography is to reveal and explain the history of biotas and their historical connections. Historical «relationship» between biotas is defined as the sharing of descendants of the same ancestor. Several generalized patterns of relationship, rather than a single universal one, should be expected for any set of biotas or areas. Such generalized patterns must be sought by comparison of individual patterns, based on individual monophyletic groups. Generalized patterns of biota relationships are formally statements about numerical universals, while a pattern derived from an individual group is a statement about a particular. Such statements are not subject to testing in the Popperian sense; they may be falsified as well as verified. As in other historical sciences, explanation in historical biogeography is genetic in form and probabilistic in nature. An explanation is falsified when an explanatory premise is, and corroborated when an explanatory premise is verified. Two major methodologies exist to derive «area cladograms» from substituted (taxon) cladograms, Component Analysis and Parsimony Analysis. It is argued that Parsimony Analysis is the theoretically more satisfactory of these because it treats all sources of «error» in the same way, making no process‐related assumptions about the sources of conflicts. The rooting of area dendrograms is problematic. The rooting by an «allzero» outarea is theoretically unsound and the dendrogram should be rooted a posteriori adjacent to the ancestral area(s), or not at all.

A priori and a posteriori methods in comparative evolutionary studies of host–parasite associations

“…Despite the fact that both a priori and a posteriori methods use the same null hypothesis, they implement different research programs, based on different ontologies (see also Andersson, 1996). A priori methods (CA and RTA) modify the data when necessary to provide maximum fit to the null hypothesis of cospeciation; this amounts to an a priori parsimony criterion.…”

A step-wise approach to integrating phylogeographic and phylogenetic biogeographic perspectives on the history of a core North American warm deserts biota

“…First, we use a more inclusive set of co-distributed phylogroups, drawn from mammalian, avian, reptilian, amphibian, and cactus groups. Second, in accord with arguments for applying step-wise procedures in a historical biogeographic analysis, and in recognition that each step might require a different analytical method (Morrone and Crisci, 1995;Andersson, 1996), we present a step-wise procedure (Fig. 3) that incorporates a sequential set of analyses, proceeding from phylogeographic to phylogenetic biogeographic and back to phylogeographic arenas.…”

Historical biogeography: A review of its basic concepts and critical issues

“…Historical biogeography methods and approaches could be classified using different criteria, which then result in different taxonomies (see for example: Andersson, 1996;Humphries, 2000;Lieberman, 2000;Van Veller et al, 2000). Some of these taxonomies have been the subject of recent discussions (see Ebach, 2001;Brooks and McLennan, 2002;Ebach et al, 2003, and literature cited therein).…”