We caught up with Paul to get a sample of his argument, pre-panel.
Here is a sampling of soft constructivist arguments against PCE defenders: (1) PCEs are impossible because of the "kind of beings" that we are (Katz, 1978, 59).
The first treats analogical reasoning as generalization from a single case; the second treats it as a kind of sampling argument.
(This can be established rigorously with an argument based on random sampling of gametes, analogous to the argument used in the one-locus case).
The simplest version of the sampling argument is due to Mill (1843/1930).
Others argue that while they are closely related to mollusks and other lophotrochozoan groups such as annelid worms or perhaps brachiopods, they are not members of the Mollusca (see Vinther and Nielsen 2005; Caron et al. 2006; Butterfield 2006 for a sampling of both pro and con arguments).
A more skeptical line of argument is that if we need 20,000+ samples to detect an effect, most likely what we see has very small effect size.
Several schools of argument have arisen.
