Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Misunderstandings about evolution (second nomination)

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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. The argument that another article serves the same basic function is compelling to me, the argument that the two are slightly different less so, since the clear solution to that is to expand the scope of objections to evolution. If anyone would like the text from this article to merge parts of it into objections to evolution, let me know and I will make it available. Chick Bowen 21:45, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Misunderstandings about evolution

Misunderstandings about evolution (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

This article is a remnant of a move to Objections to evolution, per the last AfD and talk page discussion. All the content from this article was included and expanded upon since then, but this article wasn't removed after the page move. darkliight[πalk] 03:41, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

  • Keep - This article is ostensibly different from the objections article in that it aims to explain misunderstandings independent of those objections that are fielded as part of the creation-evolution controversy. --ScienceApologist 04:11, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
  • No one disputes that this article is "different". An objection is not the same thing as a misunderstanding. What's under dispute is whether these misunderstandings deserve to have a separate article, and whether giving them one is the best way to present this information to the reader. The objections article encompasses both objections and the misconceptions they are frequently based upon; in this respect, "Misunderstandings about evolution" is, at least in practice, just a shrunken, incomplete version of the Objections article. Its contents are redundant to sister articles like Objections, mother articles like Evolution, and daughter articles like Devolution; it is for this reason, not because a "misunderstanding" is the same thing as an "objection" (which it obviously isn't; the two are just inextricably linked in this case), that the article should be deleted. -Silence 01:45, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Keep though I certainly did not expect to say this. But upon unprejudiced comparison of the current forms of the two versions, the distinction made above is to some extent correct. The misunderstandings" article is an attempt to talk about evolution per se, and the "Objections"--well, it deals with the objects, and the answers to them. It is highly desirable to have one article that talks at an elementary level about some of parts of the theory that are often misunderstood--and misunderstood not only by creationists. The debate must be dealt with, and it has naturally been extremely difficult to do so objectively. But it should be possible to give an explanation of various religious theories, and of the scientific theory, in a self-contained way. The scientific articles about evolution in WP do so admirably, but at a relatively advanced level. It's good to have a simpler one. DGG 04:44, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete Two reasons. First, this article is not very informative. Second, the Objections article covers these points more than adequately, and is better written. Misunderstandings are objections anyways. Orangemarlin 05:13, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
  • I'm revising my reasons because I did not clearly delineate my reasoning. Misunderstandings are not notable, because, frankly, it's not our job to correct misunderstandings. That could take an infinite amount of time. When misunderstandings then become common knowledge or evolve (word intentionally used) into an objection, then it it becomes, de facto, an objection. For example, one of the biggest misunderstandings about Evolution is the old "it's only a theory" line of reasoning. That would be irrelevant, except it's used as an objection. My point is a misunderstanding isn't important until it mutates into an objection. A misunderstanding isn't relevant. Orangemarlin 05:34, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
First, the article not being informative is not a reason for deletion. Second, the objections article is written from the perspective of the controversy and, as DGG pointed out, there are misunderstandings that can be had independent of the controversy. And who defines misunderstandings as objections? --ScienceApologist 05:36, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
I do. I believe half of the objections are basically misunderstandings. Do you know how many Catholic friends I have think their church is opposed to Evolution? That's a misunderstanding that becomes an objection. Orangemarlin 05:41, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
This is verging very closely on a rationale that is not accepted for AfDs which is one of personal taste. And, I might point out, that not all misunderstandings are objections. You just gave a singular example. Certainly not all misunderstandings about evolution are in the context of objections due to religion. --ScienceApologist 06:35, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
OK, I might somewhat agree with you, but I think misunderstandings about evolution are only relevant if they end up being objections. Otherwise they're certainly not very notable. I mean people misunderstand just about everything. Until five or six months ago, when I got serious about Wikipedia, I myself misunderstood things about Evolution--but that was from ignorance, nothing else. As for "personal taste", well, you might be right there, because I think the article is really bad, but I think of personal taste as being not liking an article about pornography or bestiality or something like that. I don't like this article because it is a waste of editor's time, as long as Objections is around, because misunderstandings doesn't become notable or relevant until it becomes an objection. In any case, you know the last thing I would support is the deletion of a pro-Evolution article, so it's got to be really, really bad for me to want it deleted. Orangemarlin 08:49, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
I don't really agree. A misunderstanding can be relevant without being an objection, at least in theory. Suppose everyone in the world thought that gravity was the process of things being magnetically attracted to each other? That would be an extremely noteworthy misunderstanding (because of its ubiquity), but not necessarily an objection. It just happens to be the case for evolution that there are few to no misunderstandings that aren't also objections; this is an issue of practicality, not of theoretical speculation. A misunderstanding need only be extremely commonplace and, perhaps, unusual/non-obvious to be noteworthy. "Misunderstandings about evolution" is a bad topic for an article; that doesn't mean that we shouldn't cover noteworthy misunderstandings, it just means that we don't need a separate article to cover them. There are much better ways to integrate the same information into a coherent whole, rather than isolating them in a little "misunderstanding island". -Silence 01:52, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
Orangemarlin, you are mistaken in defining a "misunderstanding" as an "objection", and it is in any case not your place to try to redefine the English language based on your specific word definitions. Your vote is correct, but your rationale needs some work. First, believing that one's church is opposed to evolution is not an "objection" to anything; it may either be a misunderstanding or an understanding, but it's not an objection, because it's not an opinion about how things should or shouldn't be; rather, it's an idea about the way one thinks things already are. If you misunderstand gravity, that doesn't mean you object to it; and a misunderstanding of gravity can never, in itself, constitute an objection to gravity. In the same way, a misunderstanding about evolution is never an objection to evolution; rather, misunderstandings form the basis for pretty much every objection to evolution there is.
Don't I have the right to say delete, I didn't realize my vote carried so much weight that I have to defend everything I wrote. I agree that I'm not redefining the words. But to me misunderstandings aren't very notable. It's only when a misunderstanding leads to an objection does it become important enough to warrant an article. But geez, if my vote meant so much, I'd have shut up in the first place. Orangemarlin 02:53, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
"Articles for deletion" is not a vote, Orangemarlin. It's a discussion. Your "vote" only has as much weight as your arguments do—if you don't have compelling reasoning (be it for "keep" or for "delete"), then your "vote" will count for next to nothing. Nobody is contesting your comments because your "vote" is any more important than anyone else's; rather, we're discussing what you said because it's important for us to work out why we should (or shouldn't) delete this article, an essential aspect of which is analyzing the arguments for and against each option. If you disagree with our objections, then feel free to respond to them; but saying "it's just my opinion" is essentially invalidating your own influence on the discussion, and thus on the AfD's outcome. -Silence 03:20, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
And therein lies the problem: it's not that the misunderstandings are objections, it's that the misunderstandings and objections are intricately connected, both causally and intellectually. It doesn't make sense to have a "Misunderstandings" article distinct from the "Objections" article here because the two topics are next to useless in isolation from each other; it would be like having a "Facts about evolution" article distinct from an "Evolutionary processes" article; it's not that "process" and "fact" are synonyms, but that you can't properly explain the two in isolation. In a similar way, although on a conceptual level "misunderstandings" are very different from "objections", the practical fact of the matter in this case is that we simply cannot give our readers much information about either topic if we divide the two into distinct pages. How, for example, are we to explain the "evolution cannot generate new information" claim on a "Misunderstandings" page, without referencing the fact that it's one of the most prominent new creationist arguments? How are we to explain the same claim on an "Objections" page, without referencing the fact that it relies on a misunderstanding of information theory?
Or should we just not address it on "Misunderstandings", and rename Misunderstandings about evolution to Misunderstandings about evolution that don't necessarily form the basis for major creationist arguments? Because that's essentially what's happened to the article so far: in an attempt to prevent this article from just becoming a POV fork of "Objections" (which it probably will become again in the future if it's left around), the article was stripped of just about all information that wasn't covered in more depth at "Objections", and the result is the stubby, near-useless patchwork article we have today. Clearly persisting in this arbitrary and unhelpful information split is of no service to our readers, and therefore has no place on Wikipedia. If you want to correct people's misconceptions about evolution, do so on Evolution! That's what encyclopedias are for. We can't have "misunderstandings" pages for every topic, as that would just cause those misunderstandings to become more common, by hiding them away from the top-level articles they belong in. -Silence 01:45, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
An article not being informative because of its specific contents is not reason for deletion, but an article not being informative because of its subject matter is reason for deletion. In this case, it's not informativeness that's the issue, so much as redundancy; the best way to present this information is by discussing it briefly on Evolution, and in more depth in topic-specific daughter articles. Having an intermediary article like "Misunderstandings" between the top-level article and the topic-specific ones is completely unnecessary here. -Silence 01:45, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
Misunderstandings are not objections. If you misunderstand electromagnetism, does that mean you object to electromagnetism? Obviously not. The problem with Misunderstandings about evolution isn't that it's a synonym for "Objections", but that it's an unhelpful grouping of unrelated topics that are better covered elsewhere. It would be like if we had an article called Facts about evolution, or Misunderstandings about George Washington; in both cases, the subject is better covered in the specific articles for that topic (Evolution and its topic-focused daughter articles in the former case, George Washington in the latter). Moreover, they are better-covered by sprinkling them throughout the article wherever they are relevant, rather than by shoving them all into a single "Misunderstandings" section/article (particularly for a topic as broad as Evolution!). -Silence 01:45, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
I do agree with what you are saying. Apparently, I was not clear in what I meant, so I revised my comments. I think I'm in absolute agreement with your opinions, in that I do not believe that misunderstandings=objections, more that objections are a solid subset of misunderstandings (and evolved from misunderstandings). The misunderstanding article is "cruft" to quote a word I've seen about the Evolution discussions. Orangemarlin 05:39, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Weak Keep. Although I could go either way on this one, and my original inclination was to replace it with Objections to evolution, I think I have changed my mind. Misunderstandings about evolution could satisfy a different purpose than Objections to evolution, although it might need some rewriting. I also have noticed that Objections to evolution has become much longer than I had originally envisioned, and might become longer still, so there is a reason to have a shorter more accessible article on this subject.--Filll 20:18, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
    • That might sound great in theory, but I've tried many times to find an effective, neutral, practical, and verifiable way to clearly distinguish misunderstandings from objections for many months now, and neither I nor anyone else has yet come up with a remotely effective way to do it. The problem is that there is simply too much overlap: having full-fledged articles for both "misunderstandings" and "objections" would either result in the two being 90% redundant to each other due to having to repeat each other's information, or in the two being arbitrarily segregated so that certain topics are covered on one and other topics on the other. Look over Objections to evolution and try to carve up the article between things that are and aren't "misunderstandings", in one sense or another. Not only is this a monstrously difficult task for the editors, but it also seems counterproductive for the readers, who won't understand, much less agree with, our criteria for determining whether, for example, "evolution can't generate new information" is a misunderstanding or an objection. I realize that the idea of a misunderstandings article might be an appealing one, but I see no reason to believe it is even possible to have a "Misunderstandings" article on Wikipedia that isn't biased, redundant, or arbitrary. Currently, the article is redundant, having very little content and with all that content already available on other articles; if we expand it to include every misunderstanding addressed at "Objections", it will become redundant, biased, and bloated; if we expand it but try to keep it and "Objections" distinct, it will become inconsistent and arbitrary. There simply isn't any way to make this article workable; every truly applicable solution to its current uselessness is inferior to solutions that simply involve its contents being merged elsewhere, such as into Evolution (where a single sentence could cover everything already covered in this article simply by providing links to Biological devolution, Evolution as theory and fact, and Survival of the fittest!), Objections to evolution, and its more focused daughter articles. -Silence 22:31, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete for same reasons as detailed in first nomination and on the article talk page. This article is redundant, and therefore of no value for the encyclopedia project as a whole. Although certainly the information it contains is useful (disregarding the many inaccuracies and poor phrasings also in the current article), the exact same information is already provided, and provided better, by other articles. Objections to evolution does indeed cover a surprising range of misunderstandings (all the ones discussed on this page, plus dozens more), and there are also specific articles for each individual topic covered here: Evolution as theory and fact for the first section, Biological devolution for the second, and survival of the fittest for the third. There is simply too much overlap for this article to be of real value; I don't see the purpose of bending NPOV policy here by characterizing creationist arguments as "misunderstandings" when we have an Objections article covering that already, and with those borderline topics removed from this article it only has a handful (currently merely 3!) of "misunderstandings" to discuss, and can no longer cover enough ground to merit a distinct page. Note that most editors on Talk:Evolution seem to also agree that this is an unnecessary page, and that its corresponding subsection on Evolution, "Misunderstandings", has been deleted as well. There seems to be consensus that the most useful place to discuss misunderstandings is in topical pages about the specific issues, rather than on a generic, all-encompassing page for unrelated misconceptions. If someone misunderstands speciation, the best place to discuss that misunderstanding is on Speciation, not on Misunderstandings about evolution! That's where it's most likely to actually benefit readers. -Silence 22:19, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete per Silence. Metamagician3000 23:21, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete for the reasons given by Silence. Timb66 12:36, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Weak delete. This article is so terrible, WP will loose nothing by deleting it.Biophys 21:09, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Comment - as not living in the US I will perhaps never grasp whether so much air time is given to a controversy only slightly more rational than Daniken belief system. With this caveat at the front, in my personal, totally irrelevant opinion, all these "pedagogical treatments" of the subject (i.e. both this article and Objections to evolution and whatever more lurks in the corners of Wikipedia) should be transwikied and make a decent book at WikiBooks. --Pjacobi 09:34, 5 May 2007 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.