Talk:Molecular equidistance

message: I was poking around on Michael Denton's cytochrome c argument and ran across this entry in
Wikipedia.  Although it is muddy reading and equivocates a good deal, it seems to be making 
the dubious case, originally put forward by Michael Denton, that molecular equidistance is
some sort of astounding revelation that turns contemporary biology on its head.
Actually -- and the article seems to tapdance on this issue -- all it says is that modern
species that stem from a common ancestor demonstrate a roughly similar divergence in 
the structures of molecules such as cytochrome c from the time of their divergence.  This
is not just unsurprising, it's what would be expected.
Denton did make an issue of the implicit assumption in this argument that there are uniform
rates of divergence of cytochrome c along different lineages, claiming that there was no
way such a "molecular clock" could be so constant.  That was what I was scouting out when I
found this article -- as best I can tell, the answer to that is that there is a debate over
the issue.
What made me suspicious about his article was the closing comments about most biologists not
realizing that monkeys are equally related to chimps and humans.  Uh ... did somebody conduct
a poll on the matter?  I'm not a biologist, I'm not even a scientist, but anybody who bothered
to read a bit on evolutionary biology even at a popular level would know that apes and humans
are on one branch of the primate family tree, monkeys are on another, and like on any good tree
the members of one branch have the same general relationship to members on another.  Few 
would have any trouble with the idea that lions and tigers are equally related to wolves, even
if they'd never heard of molecular equidistance. I would be astounded to find that most 
biologists are not as well versed on the subject as I am.
That statement sounds only too much like saying:  "People who haven't investigated the matter
at all might have some mistaken ideas about it."  Yep, that's what usually happens when people
express opinions on matters that they haven't done any homework on.  "So what's your point?"  
I can't figure out if this article is an oblique exercise in Darwin-bashing, or if it's just 
so badly written and ambiguous that it can be interpreted as one.  Either way, it needs to
be rewritten into a form where it is possible to figure out what it is really trying to say.  
MrG 4.225.210.108 (talk) 15:57, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed. This is so POV it's embarrassing; it reads like a promotional tract. I'll see what I can do... — Scientizzle 00:06, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Suspicious Article 

message: Does this topic get any significant coverage that isn't connected with this book? If not, then it should probably be merged into the book's article. HrafnTalkStalk 09:44, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Johnson is most likely simply repeating Denton without much in the way of elaboration (e.g. see discussion here), particularly as Johnson has no background in science to allow independent analysis and both Johnson & Denton were both active in the early days of ID. I'm not familiar with Christian Schwabe, let alone with his usage of the term. HrafnTalkStalk 14:57, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

text: Ok, now I get it. Yes, lets definitely merge it.--Filll (talk) 18:15, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

text: The article states that the "term that was first used by Michael Denton" (my emphasis), not that he was the first to note the phenomenon. Your quotation does nothing to contradict this. In any case, the merger discussion was concluded some time ago with a consensus to merge. Your recent attempts to undo this merger is in violation of WP:CONS. HrafnTalkStalk 04:24, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

text: The phrase "Molecular equidistance" appears to be more heavily associated with Denton than with Margoliash. Can you present any evidence that it's use as a description of Margoliash's work has received widespread acceptance? Margoliash's work  is already covered in articles such as Distance matrices in phylogeny & Computational phylogenetics. HrafnTalkStalk 15:56, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

text: if you read the article  it states on page 675 "Relatively closely related species show few differences: there are only three variant residues between the horse and pig proteins. Phylogenetically distant species exhibit wider dissimilarities. The largest differences are observed between the vertebrate and yeast cytochromes c." All mammals share a single common ancestor with yeast, and have been diverging from that ancestor for the same length of time. So as you would predict, they have roughly the same level of sequence divergence to such a far-removed group. As that 1963 paper notes "It should be noted that the present results are compatible only with the commonly accepted scheme of evolution represented by series of branching lines, and are not consistent with a simultaneous formation of all species, which then proceed to accumulate mutations independently. In the latter case all the cytochromes c should be equally different from all others." Tim Vickers (talk) 22:37, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

text: I am not objecting to an article on Margoliash and his work, I am merely suggesting that "Molecular equidistance", a phrase more tightly associated with Denton's misrepresentation of said work, would tend to blur the line between the work and the misrepresentation, so would probably be an inappropriate title for such an article. HrafnTalkStalk 03:55, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

text: I think a merge with the book that popularised the phrase makes good sense - this isn't something people are going to search for. Other discussions of the published data on sequence similarity between species would fit better at phylogenetics or molecular clock. As to the idea itself, looking at figure 3 of  would be a good starting point. Tim Vickers (talk) 22:50, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

text: Wikipedia reports what is WP:verfiiable, in this case the usage of the phrase by Denton. It is not a soapbox for those wishing to rehabilitate the phrase. HrafnTalkStalk 01:25, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Molecular equidistance and [[Evolution: A Theory in Crisis]] 

message: The result was merge into Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. -- HrafnTalkStalk 14:59, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Merger proposal

message: Actually I think there is real science here, which might not have made its way into the article yet. For example, there are several different methods for determining genetic distances (why is it called molecular equidistance?) and there is a history of these methods and statistics etc. I do not think we have included this material yet, which might make this a far more reasonable article.--Filll (talk) 16:43, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Ok, now I get it. Yes, lets definitely merge it.--Filll (talk) 18:15, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

text: The article states that the "term that was first used by Michael Denton" (my emphasis), not that he was the first to note the phenomenon. Your quotation does nothing to contradict this. In any case, the merger discussion was concluded some time ago with a consensus to merge. Your recent attempts to undo this merger is in violation of WP:CONS. HrafnTalkStalk 04:24, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

text: The phrase "Molecular equidistance" appears to be more heavily associated with Denton than with Margoliash. Can you present any evidence that it's use as a description of Margoliash's work has received widespread acceptance? Margoliash's work  is already covered in articles such as Distance matrices in phylogeny & Computational phylogenetics. HrafnTalkStalk 15:56, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

text: if you read the article  it states on page 675 "Relatively closely related species show few differences: there are only three variant residues between the horse and pig proteins. Phylogenetically distant species exhibit wider dissimilarities. The largest differences are observed between the vertebrate and yeast cytochromes c." All mammals share a single common ancestor with yeast, and have been diverging from that ancestor for the same length of time. So as you would predict, they have roughly the same level of sequence divergence to such a far-removed group. As that 1963 paper notes "It should be noted that the present results are compatible only with the commonly accepted scheme of evolution represented by series of branching lines, and are not consistent with a simultaneous formation of all species, which then proceed to accumulate mutations independently. In the latter case all the cytochromes c should be equally different from all others." Tim Vickers (talk) 22:37, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

text: I am not objecting to an article on Margoliash and his work, I am merely suggesting that "Molecular equidistance", a phrase more tightly associated with Denton's misrepresentation of said work, would tend to blur the line between the work and the misrepresentation, so would probably be an inappropriate title for such an article. HrafnTalkStalk 03:55, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

text: I think a merge with the book that popularised the phrase makes good sense - this isn't something people are going to search for. Other discussions of the published data on sequence similarity between species would fit better at phylogenetics or molecular clock. As to the idea itself, looking at figure 3 of  would be a good starting point. Tim Vickers (talk) 22:50, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

text: Wikipedia reports what is WP:verfiiable, in this case the usage of the phrase by Denton. It is not a soapbox for those wishing to rehabilitate the phrase. HrafnTalkStalk 01:25, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Discussion