Fossil Record paper

[John Alroy <jack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Benton's Science paper is indeed "fundamentally flawed," but this has nothing
at all to do with his use of families as proxies for lower-level diversity (if
you have any lingering doubts concerning the validity of this widely used
procedure, check out the Sepkoski and Kendrick paper in Paleobiology). Instead,
Benton's problem is that he ignores 20 years of literature carefully documenting
the fact that diversity grows logistically and not exponentially, as he claims;
and ignores volumes of sophisticated statistical work in the 80's on the
periodicity problem, instead taking a completely qualitative approach that
yields an uninterpretable conclusion - i.e., Sepkoski's extinction percentages
are largely correct, but somehow the small variations Benton detects are good
justification for ignoring the statistical evidence for periodicity.

This is not a personal diatribe. I've only met Mike Benton once and I have no
problem with him. The _real_ problem is a general lack of communication (surely
counteracted by this list) that results in our failing to present a united
front and instead letting the general public/scientific establishment think we
are a lot more quarrelsome and confused than we really are. Soapbox off...