The Bats and the Bees
The wording of your article1 was sufficiently imprecise to provoke a brain gag on my part. Bat and bird wings are homologous!? No! Analogous, I say. They do NOT use the same bones, etc. Skin vs. feathers, etc. One can make bat wings homologous to insect wings by the article's usage simply by increasing the ancestor group size.
Doug Miller
University of California, San Francisco
dmiller@rorl.ucsf.edu
1. L. Pray, "Phylogenetics: Even the terminology evolves," The Scientist, 17[11]:14, June 3, 2003.
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