Mimicry and gene flow among butterfly species: reply to Brower and Garzón-Orduña

Once again, Brower and Garzón- Orduña criticize the majority of their fellow students of the butterfly genus Heliconius, especially the current authors. Once again, they fail to provide any new data or even reanalyses of the copious data we have painstakingly collected. Instead, they rely on their instinct that our conclusions are wrong. We wonder whether B&G’s extreme scepticism towards any suggestion that hybridisation or introgression has any evolutionary importance perhaps stems from a strong prior belief as parsimony-promoting cladists: that evolution of species is tree-like rather than net-like.  

In the course of their argument, B&G accuse us of being unscientific by accepting our preferred hypothesis too easily: “evidence that is consistent with a hypothesis does not necessarily refute alternative hypotheses, and science does not proceed by ‘confirming’ one’s preferred theory.” Thank you, B&G, for letting us know about the proper way to do science! – except that we didn’t do what B&G said we did. We refuted alternative hypotheses via statistical tests.  

B&G also reiterate a theme they have used earlier, by complaining about “the vastness of genomic data sets.” To our knowledge neither B nor G has ever generated or analysed any genomic dataset. Nonetheless, B&G accuse us, who do use and generate genomic datasets, of “pareidolia”, a word neither of us had previously heard of. After a quick visit to Wikipedia, we find that they think we have a psychological problem and that we erroneously perceive patterns in random data from our results.  As we point out, our results are all tree based (e.g., Fig. 2) – do B&G, as cladists, seriously doubt the evidence from these well-supported trees we have found in the genome proving introgression?