Talk:Genetic drift/Archive 4

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Meta request on discussion: could SLR (and anybody else) please sign posts, I'm having difficulty sometimes figuring out just who is replying to whom. Thanks. Good discussion (well, mostly) by the way, let's try and avoid going into an ad hominem direction, which I think we are mostly avoiding. Everybody here is clearly trying to achieve the same thing, getting the right kind of consensus on what is clearly a tricky subject, can take time. -- Lexor 02:16 21 May 2003 (UTC)

(Not in response to the specific SLR post immediately above) SLR, to the extent your issues are really only about content, I believe you would find a place for that content in the sections I created in my recent version. You seem to be unfairly representing this debate that as exclusively about content. It isn't really about content (unless you count as content, as you seem to, text that asserts that it is essential to understand HWE to understand drift, an assertion that I believe is false). I also think it's primature to make content a basis for a "this version or that version" comparison. There's lots of room for more content in the structure I have proposed. But I believe we need to keep the introductory section accessible to all readers, to restrict it to the essence of drift, and--succintly, succinctly, succinctly--to get all the essence of drift in there. In other words, I think we should not break up the ('brilliant prose'-nominated) intro section by inserting large clumps of content, as has been your tendency. I am open to revisions of the intro, but very much less so when they come at the cost of succinctness, clarity, accessibility and engagingness. I am certainly all for corrections of bona fide errors or flaws, and I have made a few along the way, including ones that you called attention to (my addition of the word "birth"). The great majority of supposed errors you have pointed to, though, just aren't--or at least, you haven't convinced me that they are, and (except that this topic is subtle, and you are a skilled rhetoritician) I'd be surprised if you'd convinced others. 168... 18:54 21 May 2003 (UTC)

I think you are right that structure is as important as content, and I welcome your invitation to consider structure. Perhaps we differ on the value of headings -- I think they are useful for making the structure of an article clear. I tried to structure my version (which did include much of what you wrote, or points you made) as a general definition, a discussion of process that act on all organisms (asexual and sexual), a discussion of processes acting on only sexual organisms, and a more detailed discussion of the place of drift in theories or models of evolution. Frankly, I do not quite get your structure. But I agree with you that at this point we might be more productive if we discuss structure rather than content. Could you please explain the structure you see in your version? I'd like to know what you think are the problems with the structure I worked out, and what you think are the advantages of your structure -- I mean this in good faith, Slrubenstein


Actually, I expressed a lot of my philosophy in the remarks above beginning "But I believe we need to keep..." Also in my remarks about HWE as not needing to come before anything else. Just to flesh out an example, I take the gamete issue as important for the case of sexually reproducing species, but not essential to drift, and b/c it's hard to describe succinctly (except w/ an allusion to "birth" as arena in which chance has an input), I believe it doesn't "belong," or let's say it doesn't "work", in the first section. Meanwhile HWE, though it does figure in traditional text-book approaches to explaining drift, in strict terms I believe is inessential to drift--and indeed I believe my intro nicely explains the essence of drift accurately without it. I regard HWE as a worthy piece of enrichment to place farther along in the article. 168... 19:35 21 May 2003 (UTC)

Aside from at least one very substantive disagreement about the causes of drift (i.e. mortality), SLR and I seem to disagree deeply about what is "good writing" or "good explanation." It seems to me that Wikipedia offers no way out of such disputes. "Be aggressive" we are told. It doesn't seem to me that Wikipedia demands people either to compromise or submit to majority rule. These two potential policies have something to say for them, of course, but then they aren't necessarily the most efficient schemes for generating top-notch articles. Sweden and Norway don't hold a plebiscite to award the Nobel, for example. Thoughts anyone? 168... 20:06 21 May 2003 (UTC)

Once again you seem to disdain any effort at reasonable discussion. Yes, we do disagree about good writing. But that does not mean we cannot discuss how to make the article better. You suggested we focus on structure. So I summed up the way I envisioned the structure of the article (I could provide an outline, but I don't think that level of detail is necessary). I also explained that I did not understand the structure of your version. Note, I did not say it had a bad structure (I happen to think it does, but my point here is that I am trying to work with you here in a constructive way. I am admitting that perhaps I just do not understand your structure); I asked you to explain the structure. And you have not. Note, I did not ask you what your "philosophy" was. So far, all you have said is that the article should be accessible (I agree), and that the intro should state the "essence" of drift (I agree). But you haven't explained your structure (all you have done is disagree with mine, stating that HWE should be later in the article). I ask you again, sincerely, what exactly do you see as the structure of the article? What would be the logic? My structure seems logical to me: after an introduction, discuss the most inclusive forms of drift (i.e. including asexual and sexual reproducing populations; I already agreed with you that HWE does not belong here), then more exlusive forms of drift (i.e. in sexual reproducing populations; it is here that I place the HWE because it is essential to drift in sexually reproducing species), then theoretical issues drift raises for the study of evolution. This seems logical to me, but it is different from your structure. I am not sure what your structure is, and I do not see the logic -- but I am asking you to explain it to me. That seems like a reasonable way to proceed in working on an article. Slrubenstein


As an anthropologist you must realize that there are diverse ways of being reasonable. I am discussing reasonably, but you aren't appreciating my points. I wrote above: "But I believe we need to keep the introductory section accessible to all readers, to restrict it to the essence of drift, and--succintly, succinctly, succinctly--to get all the essence of drift in there." You seem to have missed the last words: "to get all the essence of drift in there." This is news style.

"News style" would be, "Drift is a concept developed by Brooks in 1899" etc.

Your second section appears in what is the middle of my introductory section and leaves the rest for later.

In other words, I had a more conceise introductory section. I thought that was good news style! You repeat succinct three times, but when I write a more succinct introduction than you, get get irritated!Slrubenstein

Hence your introductory section doesn't capture all that I think is essential. For example, essence for me includes the conclusion of my introductory section about "teasing apart" drift and selection.

"teasing apart" is not very clear or accurate. Yes, I agree with you that explaining the difference between drift and selection is "essential," but my intro certainly did that. And more succinctly than yours.Slrubenstein

What is essence and what is essential are subjective, the judgement is an art and not the unique result of a simple algorithm. But I will say sexual drift is not essential to drift because asexuals drift too.

In other words, you now agree with me? You now agree with my organization of Intro-inclusive drift (sexual and asexual)-sexual drift? You agree with my haveing put information about asexual drift before the section on sexual drift? Good! I am glad you see my point. Slrubenstein

QED. My intro is structured as it is not from an a priori logical plan, but because I believe it works.

You do not understand what a structure is, so I am not surprised your version has a poor structure. Even now, after I have asked you, congenially and in the spirit of collaboration, to explain to me what sort of structure you envision for the article (I do this because I wanted to respond, respectfully, that we stop arguing over content and focus instead on strcuture), you still cannot suggest a coherant structure. Give me a break and stop BSing! Slrubenstein

After that section come headings for others where I believe the indicated content, well crafted, has the potential to work with respect to the article as a whole. This is why above I framed our disagreement as about "good writing" and "good explaining." 168... 22:11 21 May 2003 (UTC)

Pointless though I think it is to discuss the matter this way, for the record, the structure of my intro is:

P1 General statements about the provenance, cause effect and process of drift.

P2 why chance figures in evolution

P3 the influence of population size on drift

P4 the distinction between and interplay of drift and selection, the other more familiar mechanism of evolution

P5 the puzzle posed by the existence of the two mechanisms and the role of drift in one of evolutionary biology's central questions

168... 05:33 23 May 2003 (UTC)

Hey SL and 168 - could you stop the revert war and the very unproductive use of the this talk page and just walk away from this article for a while? Think of all the other content you both could have added to Wikipedia had you not been here arguing with (really past) each other. This article will still be here. And in the meantime the other people who have chimed-in will be busy merging both of the versions. I for one see things about each version that I like ; I also see things about each version I don't like. If you two can't either resolve this revert war or just walk away for a while, then for the good of the project me or another Admin not involved with this edit war will probably have to freeze this page to a much older version (before the edit war started) for a while. As it is other people don't want to add much to this article because there is no way to know yet which version to work from. --mav 05:54 22 May 2003 (UTC)

I'm receptive, yet I think it would be a mistake to go forward without resolving who's right on what causes drift. In my version of the article (not that there aren't elements from others in this version), I have explained drift in a creative way that I believe is easier to understand than traditional approaches, and I think this approach gives a person a much better (more intuitive) handle on what's going on. The fact that SLR and I both think we understand drift and yet disagree about essential aspects of it (the role of mortality, how drift relates to natural selection) proves that it's possible to learn drift and to walk away without an intuitive grasp of it (i.e. one of us is wrong). When I came to this article, which had stood long dormant BTW, it was not written in a way that would convey at all to an uninitiated person how drift works (plus it was very brief). When SLR made his first edit to what I had done to the article, it was a step in the direction of the traditional and the technical, but a big step away from intelligibility and explanation. What worries me at the thought of just stepping back is that I think SLR's instinct is the common instinct--"get that jargon in there," "we need to present this how I learned it in school." I'm not saying that such an approach couldn't be made clear: e.g. When I began working with SLR's more technical approach (which he produced by gutting the article I'd gotten into a reasonable shape) I inserted text that explained the jargon and made clear what his text was only cryptically alluding to (e.g. "sampling phenomenon"). But I think the article that will result from such an approach is almost certain to be less spritely and engaging. Plus, being traditional as a rule means that if it's possible for an article to teach a subject better than most Wikipedian's learned in school, anyway the article won't. Actually, I don't know for sure that my approach to drift commits no errors (I'd see it as a serious problem if it did), but SLR's arguments and evidence only persuade me that his understanding is worse than mine. What would be ideal, I think, would be if someone who really deeply understands drift could offer some kind of verdict on the various bones of contention. Lexor, if you're reading, didn't you refer on your user page to teaching population genetics? Would you be willing to weigh in again simply on the points of fact? 168... 15:47 22 May 2003 (UTC)

In the first talk archive, you wrote:
"Accidental death may be a cause of drift, but it is not the basic cause. There is no way around it: drift is first and foremost a statistical phenomena." Huh? I think you've been reading too many statistics books. Statistics never killed anybody, nor did it ever produce progeny beyond the average for that person's genotype. Most readers will want to know what on earth you are talking about. Also, why are you spend three paragraphs up top telling people that drift doesn't happen? 168...
And Lexor remarked,
Slrubenstein is correct here, drift is primarily a statistical issue, it relates to the sampling error as described. Almost all texts on population genetics and evolutionary biology approach it from the perspective of Slrubenstein. Although I understand the need to describe the process intuitively as 168... has been trying to do, accuracy and precision must be primary. I am actually in the process of writing an article on the Hardy-Weinberg principle, so give me a few hours to install this, before writing a stub (actually I would describe this is as the "Hardy-Weinberg principle" rather than "Hardy-Weinberg theory", because it's really a principle which is part of the larger theory of population genetics). -- Lexor 19:24 19 May 2003 (UTC)

At that time, 168 was dismissive of Lexor's views. I am glad that you have finally come around! Slrubenstein

I think we'll have wait for Lexor to say what he meant here, b'/c I read this differently than you. I think he was reacting to my suggestion that the intuitive is primary and defending the accuracy of a point you made. I was in rhetorical mode when I wrote "statistics never killed anybody." It's a true statement. But I did not mean to suggest that I disagreed your point that drift is a sampling phenomenon. I think Lexor was rising to defend you against that assertion, either b/c he thought or b/c he though you thought I was making it. But what I was really doing was trying to show that your technical short-hand was abstract and unhelpful to the naive reader. The hyperbolic implication is that I see intuitiveness as the be-all and end-all, but that's actually far from the case. From Lexor's remarks about news style I suspect our views aren't so different about the place of the intuitive and the technical. 168... 17:16 22 May 2003 (UTC)

Incidentally, far from being dismissive of Lexor's views, not all of which you quote, I took a lot of encouragement from them. I'm not sure I would have had the determination to campaign for my values for so long if he had not (in reaction to the direction you were taking the article) pointed out the Wikipedia convention or exhortation to use news style (the essense of which, it turns out, SLR and I disagree). e.g. he said that a more common sense explanation needs to come before anything else. 168... 17:26 22 May 2003 (UTC)

Now that I think about it, in the sense that natural selection too is a "statistical effect," the designation seems less useful to me as a stand-alone label. "Sampling effect" (or SLR's "sampling phenomena [sic]") would nicely distinguish drift from selection, except that the label is too esoteric to work without elaboration. That's why I think it's best to focus on the role of "chance" or even better "luck" in the early remarks, as I was doing before SLR came in. Not that I mean to revert it now, just making a point. 168... 18:14 22 May 2003 (UTC)

Why does the article say that drift and natural selection ae opposites? I know this woud confuse my students, especially since Dobzhansky describes mutation as the opposite of drift. Slrubenstein

You've you tried it on your students? I'm flattered. How many did you try it on? While we await the hard numbers, let me quote the text:

"Drift and natural selection are effectively opposites, yet they are assumed to occur simultaneously. Through natural selection, alleles that confer an advantage become more common over many generations. These "non-neutral" alleles affect the odds of survival and the average number of offspring that genetically identical individuals will produce. But these same alleles also are subject to drift. "Neutral" alleles will drift, meanwhile, but are not subject to selection."

With all due respect to the great professor Dobzhansky, to my knowledge there is no official opposite of selection, nor any controversy about it (outside of this discussion). Furthermore, I think the above text explicitly demonstrates in what way drift is effectively opposite, legitimating use of the phrase. We went through this before, day 1 archive 1, or thereabouts.168... 21:45 22 May 2003 (UTC)

I tweaked that paragraph a bit to make the oppositeness more explicit (I overstated my case about when I said it was explicit, even now it's only implicit, and yet I think it's clear enough). I made it:

"Drift and natural selection are effectively opposites, yet they are assumed to occur simultaneously. Through natural selection, alleles that confer an advantage become more common over many generations. These "non-neutral" alleles affect the odds of survival and the average number of offspring that genetically identical individuals will produce. But these same alleles also are subject to drift. "Neutral" alleles, meanwhile, change no odds. They drift, but are not subject to selection. "

Your proposal (SLR) "Drift and natural selection are distinct phenomena" is an accurate statement, but less intriguing. I see it as moving the article in the direction of boring-ness.168... 22:08 22 May 2003 (UTC)

Evolution is a complex process that involves a number of different, often interacting, phenomena -- natural selection, drift, sexual selection, mutation, gene flow, recombination -- to pick out two and call them opposites is at best misleading, and I think more likely confusing. Whatever rarified notion you have of "intriguing," I assure you that the presence or absence of this one word is not going to make a difference in how interesting anyone finds this article, or to what extent it might spur them on to more profound reflections. Slrubenstein

I'm not reassured by your assurance. We obviously differ on good writing. Also, I'm not "banning" you as you suggest in the subject line of your reversions. Make a good change and I'll be happy to see it there. One of your proposals reflected your agenda and a point of disagreement of fact (accuracy of talking in terms of individuals). Another I believe used a word improperly. This "opposite" thing is again about style differences. I think you are being conservative and giving in to the academic temptation to pre-label things as complex, which is unnecessary and wards off non-academics. You have made your style views very clear already, so I don't view this particular change as you offering a fresh opinion on a new subject. 168... 22:26 22 May 2003 (UTC)

168, I have to say this: your versions of this article are frequently, well, badly written. For example, the above text that you purport to be a superior version is simply not good. First of all, drift and selection are NOT opposites - there is no axis along which drift and selection are playing a tug of war. They are merely, as SLR said, distinct forces that both play a role in evolution. This is clear because drift and selection may, by happenstance, produce the same results, which is not a characteristic of opposites. Second of all, your introduction of cumbersome phrases like "neutral" and "non-neutral" (which I take to be your own invention) does not help clarify the already dubious initial assertion. I find this to be true of much of the rest of your text - from your writing I imagine you sitting at your desk and reaching around behind your back in order to write, because this is the convoluted appearance of many of your passages. I'm sorry to have to be so blunt. Perhaps you do have a good grasp of the science, but if so, it isn't coming through. Personally I would like to see you take a lesser role in this article and leave the bulk of form and style to others (e.g. SLR). Graft


Hi, Graft! Sorry you're still sore over my refusal to accept your completely unnecessary and misleading invocation of the Central Dogma and Crick's role in it in at the top of the gene article. Maybe we'll be friends again some day. Anyway, thanks for stopping by. Since you're interested in biology, I suggest you read Neutral theory of evolution, because I believe it would introduce you to some new vocabulary. 168... 03:03 23 May 2003 (UTC)
I'm familiar with the use of the word "neutral" regarding selection. I've never seen "non-neutral" used before. My point still stands about bad writing, but take it as you will. If I'm sore about anything, it's your complete inability to work constructively with people. I take the fact that you got into a fight with SLR, of all people, as strong evidence of this. Your way, or the highway, I suppose. We'll all just shove off, okay? Graft
Actually, let me clarify: You use "neutral" and "non-neutral" alleles to describe the relationship between selection and drift. Except these concepts don't relate to drift at all - any gene can drift, whether or not it is selected for. You try to show how drift relates to "neutral" and "non-neutral" alleles, but it's impossible to do this. Thankfully this fact is hidden behind choppy sentence structure, so the confusion of the example will escape the reader unless they make a careful examination of the paragraph. This is what I mean by bad writing. Graft

Graft, I thank you for your clarification. If you could be just a little more specific, though: What part of the sentence "But these same alleles also are subject to drift" did you not understand? Or was it the word "simultaneously" in the topic sentence describing the operation of drift and selection. Actually, I'm starting to wonder if we're talking about the same paragraph. But you are usually so spot on. 168... 03:40 23 May 2003 (UTC)

"Non-neutral" is a fairly commonly used term in population genetics, I think it's fine to use it here. Both 168 and Graft, it would be great if we could leave aside problems caused by other edits on other pages, and focus on the content on this page. Again, let's just leave this page for a while, and come back to it, afresh. -- Lexor 03:31 23 May 2003 (UTC)

Folks, I have to agree with mav here. Just leave this page for a little while, it's getting counterproductive. You can always come back. This will give me (and others) a little time to digest the debate and offer some alternative ways forward. Everyone has good points, but I'm not interested in who said what first, and who edited whom, it's just draining. I haven't had time to monitor the discussion as closely as I would like and consider some resolution to this page. -- Lexor 22:25 22 May 2003 (UTC)


Go to, go to! 168... 22:31 22 May 2003 (UTC)

--- I can't really object in principle to the personal politicking that I notice SLR is doing on people's talk pages, but I want to say that I find his characterizations of my actions and my attitudes and what's been going on here just as slanted (if not more) as the posts he has typed here. I'd like to suggest that anybody who chooses to read this epic debate approach it with an open mind. It might be helpful to start at the beginning, although I don't know that that's essential. Also, some reference to the dates and times of posts to both the discussion and the article may be required to confirm the veracity of certain tellings of the history. 168... 01:41 23 May 2003 (UTC)

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