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mended publication, whereas fifteen asked for substantial modifications and
four suggested rejection (Hull 1988). The negative commentaries referred
to Croizat's style of writing or his emphasis on criticizing his opponents.
However, most of the reviewers were curious about Croizat's ideas, al-
though they would have preferred a more concise presentation. Among the
commentaries of those who declined to review the work, one irritated Nel-
son: “Study of Croizat's voluminous work has convinced me that he is a
member of the lunatic fringe” (Nelson 1977:451). Nelson sent Croizat his
manuscript with the suggestions, but when he received the corrected ver-
sion, it still did not satisfy the reviewers, so he wrote to Croizat, suggest-
ing that he and Rosen review the manuscript and become coauthors. Nel-
son found it very unlikely that a work coauthored with two researchers of
a prestigious scientific institution, one the editor of
Systematic Zoology
and
the other the president of the society that published the journal, would be re-
jected. Croizat accepted, and Nelson and Rosen added an introductory sec-
tion, footnotes, and a discussion of the principles of phylogenetic system-
atics, and the work was eventually published (Croizat et al. 1974). Croizat
found it unacceptable, suggesting that his ideas had been distorted by Nel-
son and Rosen. It is interesting that this work, rejected by Croizat and his
followers from New Zealand, has been one of his most cited and influential
papers (Zunino 1992). Some years later, Craw and Heads tried to have the
original manuscript of Croizat published in
Systematic Zoology,
with the in-
tention of clarifying this apparently confusing situation, but their request was
denied (Grehan 2001c).
A remarkable article by Nelson (1974) shows a break with a previous art-
icle (Nelson 1969) in which he attempted to formalize phylogenetic biogeo-
graphy (see also Parenti 2007). Nelson (1974:555) wrote, “Having con-
sideredtheargumentsofCroizat(1964andotherpapers),Inowbelievethat
dispersal is not realistically resolvable by that formalization.” He provided an
example (
figs. 3.7a
-
3.7c
)
in which an ancestral species inhabiting what was
to become South America and Africa split by a vicariance event into a spe-
cies in southern South America and another widespread in northern South
America and Africa. A further vicariance event then split the latter into a spe-
cies in South America and another in Africa. If the phylogenetic relationships
of these species are correctly inferred, two alternative explanations are pos-
sible: a dispersal event from South America to Africa (
fig. 3.7d
) or a vicari-
ance explanation (
fig. 3.7e
). The first explanation, which resolves dispersal
when no dispersal occurred, is wrong. Nelson (1974) concluded by rejecting
