Talk:Evolution/Archive 40

message: ::*Comment. It's not accurate because TimVickers changed it. It was not intended as a stand-alone phylogenetic tree: its only purpose was to compare the relationships of an arbitrary assortment of genome-sequenced species. The "tips" of the tree (and thus the close relationships between those tips) do not correspond to broad phylogenetic groupings of any kind; they correspond to "random" (though heavily bias-influenced) individual species, like the zebrafish, the human, and the house mouse. Yet because the genomic information has been removed without the tree itself being correspondingly changed, we are essentially lying to our readers. The old tree is merely out-of-date; the new tree is outright deceptive, altered and taken out of its original scientific context. Such changes would be considered scientific fraud if submitted for publication without indication of the distortion involved; as the edited tree is instead being given to uninformed laypeople as though accurate, the offense is doubly bad, as it is also spreading misinformation to the public, and to the reader base for whom this article was created! -Silence 21:22, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Silence if you have not read the paper you should refrain from such language. You would not write above if you had read it, specifically this sentence: "Yet because the genomic information has been removed without the tree itself being correspondingly changed, we are essentially lying to our readers.", makes absolutely no sense in light of actually reading the paper. I can send you the pdf if you cannot access this paper. David D. (Talk) 21:37, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Feel free to send a pdf, if it'll stop the broken record and get you to actually communicate. -Silence 21:40, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I am trying to communicate but you are assuming i don't understand you point becuase i disagree with you (see above with regard to we cannot create our own tree it is original research). I'll send the pdf too. David D. (Talk) 21:47, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I apologize if I'm mistakenly inferring that you are misunderstanding my point, but everything you're saying implies that you aren't understanding my point: you say it would be "original research" to make our own tree, but the tree I'm proposing we make is no different from the "new tree", just with the excess, species-level details stripped away so we can focus on the more important relationships between the major groups of life. I never proposed adding new species to replace the horrible inconsistency, bias, and distortion in the current selection; rather, all along I've been proposing that we simply remove the species, because it doesn't significantly benefit our readers to tell them that brown rats are more closely related to wild chickens than to zebrafish. If that's "original research", than all summarizing on every article of Wikipedia is "original research", because trimming off non-essential details so readers can get a better grasp on the (still entirely intact) major points is apparently prohibited by WP:NOR. -Silence 22:01, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: No need to apologise. Here is the problem, trimming off some species will change the tree, if rerun on a computer program. Therefore, if we cut them out and say here is the tree it is not accurate at all. We would have to run the program again to create the new tree with the subset of species. David D. (Talk) 22:49, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: When have I suggested trimming off some species? My suggestion all along has been trimming off all the species. We're not writing this article for a computer program; we're writing it for human beings with little to no knowledge of biology, much less phylogeny. It doesn't matter whether we could submit the image to a computer program and have it generate correct data; all that matters is that we could submit the image to a human mind and have it learn valuable information. For the latter purpose, the simpler and more intuitive (to laypeople) the image is, the better. And since the species information is non-essential and gets in the way of easily understanding the broader phylogenetic relationships, I see no reason to retain it. -Silence 23:02, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

text: There are no such species-level details in the figure. Instead it gives an accurate impression of the relative evolutionary distances between several different broad groups of organism. This is what the figure is intended to do and this is what it does. TimVickers 22:10, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

text: Perhaps Silence's objections can be overcome with a well-crafted caption?  I think we all agree that the new circular tree is based on better data, right?  The points of contention seem to be whether its labels are too obscure for lay-readers (e.g., Firmicutes) and whether it is complete/quantitative in its distribution of species or temporal divergence.  One solution might be to explain some of the more interesting labels in the caption, and to characterize the scope of the diagram as "qualitative".  Speaking for myself, I find the new tree lucid with beautiful symmetry.  Of course, a still better Figure might be made, had we but world enough, and time. ;) Willow 21:26, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

text: *Comment. The issue isn't that it's incomplete in its distribution of species, but that it's inconsistent. I'd rather have 0 species represented, as that's the most efficient and useful way to convey the basic relationships between major groups; there is no reason, for the sake of our readers, to have such an intricate, completely unlabeled, arbitrary set of "tips" to the tree. The only reason it's there, now that the genomes and species names have been removed, is to try and shock and awe readers with the tree's complexity, even though that complexity, at least regarding the outer reaches of the tree, has no scientific significance other than to show what arbitrary species a few geneticists decided to study. This tree is essentially a pictorial form of technobabble: it sacrifices clarity and simplicity for trying to look smart and snazzy by being meaninglessly overelaborate and opaque. The problem with trying to explain the tree with a caption is that an adequate caption would be longer than the Evolution article itself. Just look at how many pages we've already used up trying to work through this tangled mess of an image? And most of us are probably hundreds of times better-educated about evolution and phylogeny than our average reader will be! So how can we expect them to discern the significance of the arbitrary stemming? -Silence 21:40, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

text: I think I can speak to this point a little, having only the vaguest understanding of phylogeny and evolution.  If we readers don't know much of phylogeny, we also don't know what we're missing.  As an expert, it may be hard to conceive, but I had no clue that brown rats and chickens were being compared in the Figure; all I could see, the only meaning the Figure held for me, was that all the grossly different types of life had emanated from a common ancestor a Very Long Time Ago.  It didn't occur to me to gauge the precise details of that divergence, or the relative percentages of its variegated branches.  Perhaps a solution might be to redirect readers smarter and more curious than me to another page, here at Wikipedia or elsewhere, that explains the circular tree in greater detail, so that we don't have to write such a large caption?  However, I do agree that a better Figure could indeed be requested and installed, once crafted and agreed upon.  Remember sweet serenity and gentle accord, we're all Wikipedians and share a common goal, Willow 22:29, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for the helpful message! I agree that we are all working toward a common goal, even if we disagree on methods sometimes, and I apologize if I was getting a bit too aggressive with some of my recent comments. However, it doesn't surprise me that the only things you gained from the image are that the great diversity of modern life all ultimately descend from a common ancestor; you could glean this same information from almost any other rendering of a phylogenetic tree. My primary problem with the circular model is that I feel that it is so complex that readers won't be likely to glean any more information than that from the image: unlike the old version of the tree, they won't be as likely to understand the relationship between Eukaryotes, Archaea, and Bacteria, nor the relationships between the major subgroups of those domains. In an extremely simple tree, it is quite plausible that a reader will get more than just the basic idea of common descent from looking over the tree; but when we overdo it like this, my fear is that even the most attentive readers will kind of "zone out" and just look in awe at the complexity without actually absorbing any of the important basic facts about how organisms are related. I don't want to awe our readers; I want to inform them. Making the image pretty, although something I passionately care about because of its use for "drawing readers in", is firmly a secondary concern for me. If one image conveys more information to your average layperson than another, then I will not hesitate to favor the more informative one. And I feel that in that respect, we can certainly do better than the current circular tree. -Silence 22:43, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

text: The poll was premature.  Let us see the new tree, we will all look at it with an open mind. There is no hurry or harm, and hopefully no prejudice.--Africangenesis 00:56, 19 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Discussion of straw poll 

message: Since this takes a primarily historical view of the modern fields of evolutionary biology, would this merge well with the "History of evolutionary thought" section? At present, the history section seems to imply that all major advanced stopped in the 1930s-40s. TimVickers 21:31, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, I wonder if we couldn't just put it in as an annotated section of "see also"? Adam Cuerden talk 21:38, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

text: I've reread the section: It probably should stay: It's well-written and efficient. But it has little to do with the history of evolution itself, and so probably isn't what Birgitte intended with her critique. Adam Cuerden talk 22:48, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

text: I think ti should be added in the macro and microevolution section that most scientists see no distinction between the two except for time. Meson man 22:52, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

text: I meant think not ti. :D Meson man 22:54, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Academic disciplines section 

message: I found that the proof of evolution was not included in the article. Could someone please add that. Jesusinmysock 20:00, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Check out Talk:Evolution/FAQ#But_isn.27t_evolution_unproven.3F. --TeaDrinker 20:07, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Not again.  Orangemarlin 23:56, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Add proof 

message: Some current thought on the beginning of biological evolution (first cells and viruses) can be found here at this paper. WAS 4.250 16:12, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Current thought on the beginning of biological evolution 

message: There seems to be a trend to replace GFDL images with PD ones on this article and natural selection. It is unclear to me what the motivation is, since GFDL was originally deliberately chosen as the license for Wikipedia. Has anything changed?
What surprises me even more is that this is apparently happening without consultation of the original contributors. Has it occurred to any agoraphobe out there to contact the contributors to ask if they would relicense the uploaded images?
The perpetrators seem to be User:Adam Cuerden and User:Wykis. The images in question are :Image:Life cycle of a sexually reproducing organism.svg, :Image:Antibiotic resistance.svg, and :Image:Evolution is change 3.png.
Most seriously, I fail to see how Wykis' contributions are an improvement on the originals: the fonts of the originals are larger and bolder, and hence easier to read in thumbnails; lines are thicker; composition is clearer (why abandon the "circle of life" paradigm?)
Would anyone like to comment? Samsara (talk • contribs) 18:27, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd suggest changing "Perpetrators" in that comment, it's not a good word choice. Is this a replacement of PNG or GIF images with SVG versions? TimVickers 18:32, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It wasn't a conscious decision on my part to replace a GDFL with the Public domain, but  I didn't see any reason to force licencing and attribution of such simple works. Do you like the new designs I made? If you do, I'm not sure I see the problem. Adam Cuerden talk 18:49, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It would have been nice if you'd acknowledged the previous work done, see . Samsara (talk • contribs) 19:39, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Weel, the new natural selection one was originally planned for the top of the page. It got put in there afterwards, when it was determined to be too detailed for the opening image. Adam Cuerden talk 20:09, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Also, it wasn't based on that; if you look up, you'll see it arising out of a black and white version, :Image:Evolution_is_change_over_time.png, which itself arose out of a version of the diagram used in tehe natural selection section. Any similarity in the final result is coincidental. Adam Cuerden talk 20:11, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Which you also authored and similarly did not acknowledge the inspiration for. Samsara (talk • contribs) 20:53, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

text: That's all fair enough, but I question the need for replacing the images, and I question the quality of the replacements. If the objective had been to recreate the originals faithfully in SVG, I wouldn't have had a problem with it. Finally, you haven't actually answered the question why it wasn't possible to contact the original uploaders (in one case, me) about the possibility of converting the image to SVG and/or releasing to public domain. The reason we license as GFDL and not as public domain is because PD allows somebody else to make a derivative and keep it in a closed format, which is evil. Samsara (talk • contribs) 20:53, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I think that a second choice after PD is CreativeCommons attribution. Otherwise, you are taking people's rights away. As long as the original content is available for free, I am happy. wykis 21:06, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Let's not detract from the point: you should have contacted the copyright holders to see if they would release an appropriate version as PD. To do so is common courtesy. Samsara (talk • contribs) 22:10, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

text: I prefer Antibiotic resistance over Evolution is change. It is more detailed, provides the key for the usefulness of an adaptation (although maybe that should be at the top, or separated from the rest of the image by a line), and is already a vector image. I can vectorize Evolution is change, as I have offered at the Graphics Lab. But I thought it was a little too simplified as a concept, and some searching brought me to this discussion.--HereToHelp 20:50, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I think Antibiotic resistance was disliked because of it talking about "final" states, and focusing on natural selection when evolution is any mechanism of change, including genetic drift. Adam Cuerden talk 23:07, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Public domain? 

message: I've been a member for many months, shouldn't I be able to edit this article? It says that anonomous people and users newer than five days cannot edit these articles. That shouldn't apply to me should it? - Henrik46 23:09, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Issue has been resolved. TimVickers 23:56, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Editing semi-protected articles 

message: Hi everyone.  A few of us are having a dispute over at epigenetics on the importance of epigenetic mechanisms in evolution.  Most of the contention is around a section on the so-called philosophical implications of non-genetic mechanisms.  Anyway, as a non-geneticist, I'd be grateful if people could take a look and see if they can straighten things out.  Needless to say, there's a big old discussion on the talk page.  Thanks in advance, --Plumbago 19:25, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Epigenetics