User talk:Felsenst

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Hello there Felsenst, welcome to the 'pedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you ever need editing help visit Wikipedia:How does one edit a page and experiment at Wikipedia:Sandbox. If you need pointers on how we title pages visit Wikipedia:Naming conventions or how to format them visit our manual of style. If you have any other questions about the project then check out Wikipedia:Help or add a question to the Village pump. Cheers! --maveric149

Contents 1 Getting at older edits of Sewall Wright 2 Your sig 3 JBS Haldane 4 Picture of you needed 5 Cladistics - adding to the word soup 6 Cladistics is up for featured article review

[edit] Getting at older edits of Sewall Wright

Kind of wish the stuff in the old Sewall Wright page was accessible now (it has vanished) as I thought it read better. (Of course I wrote some of it). Joe Felsenstein

Joe-- You can get the old Sewall Wright page edits if you know the IP address from which you made the edits. Go to the User Contributions for that IP, and there will be a list of your edits. Click on the Sewall G. Wright edits, and you'll have access to the text as it existed at that time. You can then cut and paste from there into the current article. Cheers, Greg Mayer. MayerG 08:32, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

The administrator who deleted the old Sewall Wright page on 4 January, 2006 helped out by restoring the old one at my request. You can see a copy of it here: [1]. It's not very long, though. EdJohnston 02:31, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Your sig

Hi Joe, you need to sign your posts with four tildes please ~~~~ — Dunc|☺ 13:58, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] JBS Haldane

Dear Professor Felsenstein, if that image is not of him but of his father, you should perhaps suggest its removal on the talk page. Shyamal 04:46, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

Yes, changing the title was wicked of me, but effective -- the image is gone now. It was definitely his father, not him. The pipe-smoking image on the infobox that was recently there and is now on the talk page is an excellent one, and I hope that it becomes the image on the main page. I am glad that he is once again listed as British rather than Scottish, as that is more accurate. [[Felsenst 21:27, 1 August 2006 (UTC)|Joe Felsenstein]]

[edit] Picture of you needed

Hello Professor Felsenstein,

Do you know the copyright status of the picture of you that is posted at http://www.gs.washington.edu/faculty/felsenstein.htm? It seems to me that it could be used in Wikipedia's article Joe_Felsenstein. Do you have the power to release it? Wikipedia is fussy about copyrights. If not, do you have a picture that you took yourself?

The page that is used to describe 'requests for permission' is at WP:ERP. Essentially the picture would have to be released under the Gnu Free Documentation License.

If you reply that it's OK, I'll try to upload the picture and include it in the article. Thanks, EdJohnston 20:57, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

Ed Johnston --

Yes, that is a photo taken in 2005 by my wife in our backyard. I own it. I can if needed supply a higher-resolution version. However although I am happy to release it under the GFDL, I have no idea how to do so and cannot devote the hours needed to persuade the avid photo-deleters at the Wikipedia to stay their hand. Felsenst 21:12, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

I think you've just uttered the magic words! Your verbatim response (as above) will be captured and saved by the Wikipedians in their archives as evidence of your consent. Let me know if that's the wording you'd like to use. It might be better not to say anything about the photo-deleters. I'll take care of filing the paperwork. EdJohnston 21:45, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

Photo has been posted in the Joe Felsenstein article. The GFDL image is at Image:Felsenstein.jpg in commons.wikimedia.org. EdJohnston 02:17, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cladistics - adding to the word soup

Dear Professor, I hope you get working on the cladistics and related articles soon. The article suggests that phenetics is polythetic (overall) whereas cladistics is not. My belief was that phenetics differed in that it was strictly based on morphology. The word phyletic is nowhere used. Is it synonymous with phylogenetic. cheers Shyamal 01:33, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

I am busy with other (non-Wikipedia) work right now -- in any case the whole miasma surrounding "cladistics" makes it difficult to even start. Is cladistics a method of classification? Or a method of inferring phylogenies? I think the former, but a lot of systematists disagree with me on that. You will find lots of people who say cladistics is simply inferring phylogenies by using neatly nested synapomorphies. If pressed they might later admit that it isn't quite that simple (homoplasy happens, and we don't usually know which state is ancestral). The classification is described as a phylogeny and vice versa. I think this is disastrous. It is not unique to Wikipedia, but this mess is common everywhere. BTW phenetics is not restricted to morphology. It is either (according to me) classification on the basis of overall similarity (not phylogeny) or (according to the majority of everyone else) a method of inferring phylogenies by using distance matrix methods -- and about half the time they include maximum likelihood as phenetic, and half the time not. (AARGH!) It's a total muddle reflecting muddled thinking. Phenetics is polythetic, but then phylogenetics is too if there is a reasonable amount of homoplasy. In saying cladistics isn't they are implicitly assuming that there is little homoplasy. They are using the Walt Disney version of cladistics, as people usually do in their teaching. You can make up data sets where not one derived state avoids homoplasy. Felsenst 04:16, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

I imagine that the Cladistics journal would have a definition and scope defined somewhere. Shyamal 08:10, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cladistics is up for featured article review

You might be interested in this - the article cladistics was, a long time ago, identified as a featured article, and is now up for featured article review, meaning it will no longer be considered one of Wikipedia's best articles if it does not get some substantial improvement. The article as it stands is frankly quite poor, and is neither comprehensive nor well-written, suffering in particular from muddled terminology. A few of us who contribute regularly to biology-related articles were asked to do some work on it a couple of weeks ago, but the subject is really outside my field, and it needs the attention of an expert. If you get a chance, anything you can contribute - either editing the article itself or offering suggestions for improvement - would be appreciated. Opabinia regalis 03:02, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

I don't think I can be of much help. My own view on all this is considered borderline-crackpot, and editing it to reflect my views would make it conflict with most researchers' views. The article assumes that "cladistics" is the use of nested synapomorphies, and that this is practical in essentially all real cases. (In reality this is the Mickey Mouse view, and real life does not afford us knowledge about ancestral states or give us sets of uncontradicted characters). The article goes on to equate this analysis with "phylogenetic systematics" but then later equates it with "cladistic taxonomy". I always thought that phylogenetic systematics was the construction of a monophyletic taxonomy, but the article separates the two. The article has many problems:

• Getting confused over what is classification and what is inference of phylogenies.
• Making it sound as if nesting synapomorphies is the usual method
  • Leaving the impression that we know ancestral states, and that there is no homoplasy in practice.
  • Then adding in parsimony as if it was the same thing, which it isn't
  • Then mentioning other methods such as maximum likelihood for inferring phylogenies (but never having made clear what is the connection between phylogenies and cladograms, if any).

The reason I just don't sail in and edit it to correct these problems is that the formulation in the article does fairly reflect the dominant-consensus view. In short, that view is badly muddled. This can be seen in many textbooks, whose elementary introductions to modern systematics are a total mess. It would be highly controversial of me to resolve the muddle in the article. Felsenst 13:12, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. This is why I haven't edited the article - I can't reliably distinguish between "rather controversial" and "considered borderline crackpot" :) If the reason the article seems muddled to me is due to the field itself and not to my inadequate understanding of it, then I'll keep my proboscis out of it. ('No homoplasy in practice' is really a 'consensus' view?) Opabinia regalis 06:05, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

No homoplasy in practice is an extreme view, of course. But the simple description of "cladistics" as involving nesting homoplasies is a practice that can only really work if there is no homoplasy in practice (and if we do know which states are ancestral). So the standard description of cladistics blatantly violates reality. Which is my point -- the standard textbook descriptions are a mess, and the article faithfully reflects that mess in its mess. Felsenst 08:00, 7 January 2007 (UTC)