Ain't no such thing as a "living fossil" nor is any species "primitive"!!

This Sunday, let me share with you two excellent takedowns of silly terms too often used casually to describe species, sometimes even by biologists who ought to know better.

Lucas Brouwers recently handed a well-earned smack-down to the term "Living Fossil". As if any species could ever fit that odd description. And at the end of his post, he also links to another smack-down by Jonathen Eisen last year, of the term "primitive" used even more often (esp. sadly in the bio literature) to describe species that may, at best, be termed "ancestral", but more often simply have some ancestral traits!

Remember my own rant several months ago about evolutionary ladders?

Now go out there and tell all the kids to stop using so much bad language to describe the beauty of evolution!! Didn't your Mama (and/or your advisor) teach you any better?!

Posted via email from a leaf warbler's gleanings