Please don't hate me...
What I write here now is not for criticize the work about V.walser, but to point out how many difficulties/traps the researchers can find doing a job like this. And the even bigger difficulties we laymen have to pass, to understand at least a little better the whole process behind such a work.
I personally do know very little about taxonomy and evolution, but I can understand that an ancient viper group, which was widespread in Europe thousands or millions of years ago, could gave origin to more species which now result completely isolated (walser) and very far from each other (walser and kaznakovi, for instance).
And, in fact, if there are "sister taxa" even across the oceans, this means the ancestors were the same before the continents separated.
I wanted now to underline another problem of these genetic studies, of whom I ignored the existence just few minutes ago: software.
Yes... I was reading the issue, trying to understand in a better way the meaning of p-distances and the reliability of genetics and trees, when I read another for me mysterious phrase.
The phrase was the following: "The genetic p-distances between the different species were generated with MEGA."
Stop. What the hell is MEGA? Surely an app, because scientists nowadays must rely on software to arrive to some conclusions.
And what have I found on the internet about MEGA as one of my first search results?
This:
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Why_i ... logenetics”That said, I also don't rely on MEGA5 for publishable phylogenetics work.”
“As many people have said here, MEGA is not very good for inferring phylogenies or more precisely, 'publishable phylogenies'. But MEGA is very helpful at initial stages of your data analysis. I think the alignment of the sequences is mostly done in MEGA, I do it.
Then you can build trees, infer TV/TS ratios, calculate genetic distances, etc.. there are lot more stuff you can do with MEGA. But that's it, you cannot use this analysis for publication, some journals might accept it, but most of them don't.”
I must admit many other people write MEGA is trusthworthy and good, and I do not want to say the work about walser has less value because they used MEGA and not another software.
My reflections here want to regain my post about "trust" and "belief".
There are so many error possibilities (even if it does not mean errors are necessarily present), possible traps and problems, that is sometimes very diffucult for us, who work in other sectors than genetics, to accept "at first glance" the creation of a new species with the help of DNA. And difficulties for the researchers to "defend" their pubblications and credibility against "attacks" of other experts and laymen.
That said, I sincerely hope (and I think at least with little reserve this) that walser is a true endemic and rare species of my Country and that its existence will help us to protect its valleys and its environment (which, I've seen, is also rich of smooth snakes which I like more than vipers!).