Nullary Sources

Darren Naish of the University of Southampton wrote an unbelievably long and brutal takedown of a website on his Tetrapod Zoology blog for Scientific American.

That’s right. A website. Here’s his conclusion:

… for all the reasons discussed above, he has gone off at a tangent and his work as it stands at the moment will never be accepted, or indeed be of substantive interest, to anyone else who has a strong technical interest in the evolution of pterosaurs, squamates, synapsids or other tetrapods. The Digital Graphic Segregation technique, the finding of innumerable things that no-one thinks are real, the radically weird, discordant-with-all-other-data tetrapod phylogeny, the problems of using too few characters, of selective character choice and other methodological problems, and the insistence that only he has seen the light and that we are all too blinkered and too biased to realise the veracity of his results effectively ensure that he works on an ‘academic island’, separated and essentially ignored by the rest of the community.

Now imagine every point in this paragraph explained with more words and images than you’ve ever seen in your entire life, and you’ll have 1/100 of what Naish wrote. Wowza.