delete button, skippers and hedylids

[Chris J. Durden]

Thank you for your opinion and the update on research on the hedylids. It 
sounds like they need more work.
............Chris Durden

At 11:33 AM 10/23/2001 -0700, you wrote:

>Scoble first published the idea that Hedylids are
>butterflies in 1986 (see Scoble, M. J.  1986.  The
>structure and affinities of the Hedyloidea: a new
>concept of the butterflies.  Bull. Br. Mus. nat. Hist.
>(Ent.) 53:251-286.  The idea that hedylids are related
>to butterflies was quickly refuted in 1987 in a review
>by Weintraub and Miller (see Weintraub, J. D. & J. S.
>Miller.  1987.  [Review.]  The structure and affinities
>of the Hedyloidea: a new concept of the butterflies.
>Cladistics 3: 299-304.  I can say for the sake of
>simplicity that Weintraub and Miller are far less than
>convinced about Scoble's claims, and point out many
>errors and problems with Scoble's study.  Scoble has
>defended his study (in 1988, 1990 with A. Aiello and in
>1992, refs. available upon request), but no thorough
>response to all of Weintraub & Miller's points has been
>published, and no formal re-analysis of the data has
>been made.
>
>The 1996 de Jong et al. paper concludes that the most
>likely candidates for a sister group to butterflies are
>the Uraniidae or Hedyloidea.  The authors admit that
>their results are not particularly convincing and many
>more taxa should be studied to improve the robustness of
>their data.  They did not lend particulrly strong
>support to the idea that Hedylids should be considered
>to be butterflies.
>
>The 1999 paper does not mention the Uraniidae as a
>possible sister group to the Papilionidae + Hesperiidae,
>for unknown reasons.  They do tentatively consider
>Hedylids to be butterflies (obvious from the title), but
>admit that they do so only "following Scoble's
>suggestion," and not based on the results of the 1996
>study (upon which the 1999 chapter was based).
>
>So while there is a body of literature that says
>Hedylids are sister to butterflies and skippers, this
>has not been demonstrated by any rigorous study since
>Scoble (1986).  I am personally not convinced by
>Scoble's study (or subsequent defense), and do not
>tentatively consider Hedylids as butterflies.  I think
>the butterfly-like characters seen in Hedylids are most
>likely the result of homoplasy



 
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