Talk:David Snoke

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Creationism Portal
This article is supported by the Intelligent design WikiProject.

This project provides a central approach to Intelligent design-related subjects on Wikipedia.
Please participate by editing the article, and help us assess and improve articles to good and 1.0 standards, or visit the wikiproject page for more details.
Stub This article has been rated as Stub-Class on the Project's quality scale.
Low This article has been rated as Low-importance on the importance scale.

The article has been rated for quality and/or importance but has no comments yet. If appropriate, please review the article and then leave comments here to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it will need.
Wikipedian An individual covered by or significantly related to this article, David Snoke, has edited Wikipedia as
Dwsnoke (talk · contribs).
This user's editing has included this article.

Readers are encouraged to review Wikipedia:Autobiography for information concerning autobiographical articles on Wikipedia.

Contents

[edit] Edits by David Snoke

I have added neutral biographical information on this page, since it is about myself. This has been deleted. I do not understand the reason for this deletion since the info is entirely neutral.

In addition, I have edited the section on the paper with Behe. The present version does not read "neutrally" at all but instead uses words like "debunked" without any citations. It is fair to say the paper is controversial, perhaps makes simplistic assumptions, and that the Discovery has over-hyped it, but it is not fair to present it as "debunked". —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dwsnoke (talk • contribs) 18:29, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

  1. You have a WP:COI on this article -- you should not be editing it.
  2. Many of your edits were unsourced. They appear to amount ot no more than WP:OR claims of your own.
  3. A number of your edits were POV:
    • "The paper has become a football in the Intelligent Design debate" implies that it was some sort of innocent victim.
    • "Although it makes the fairly limited claim that..." is likewise attempting to 'frame' it as a modest & reasonable paper.

HrafnTalkStalk 18:43, 8 March 2008 (UTC)


Saying the paper is "debunked" without any citation is also POV. A look at the paper itself, or the response to Lynch, will show clearly that it took a very narrow scope and did not make grand claims. There is no question others in the ID community took it and ran with it, but the paper itself is very limited. This is not POV, it is evident from the paper.

Two additional paragraphs were purely factual-- my biographical info on science-faith issues and my role in the paper. I am adding these back-- these are straight factual. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dwsnoke (talk • contribs) 19:03, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

You need a citation to realize that your paper is complete baloney? But you knew full well what would happen with that paper, so your idea that you are somehow innocent for how it was eventually used is highly suspect. Baegis (talk) 19:35, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

While the guideline WP:COI is doubtless important (though is not an absolute provision on editing his own article), I hope all editors are also familiar with the "Dealing with edits by the subject of the article" section of the Biographies of Living Persons policy. To quote Jimmy Wales, as quoted in that policy, "... reverting someone who is trying to remove libel about themselves is a horribly stupid thing to do." If Mr Snoke feels that some material here is libellous or unfair, it needs to be properly sourced, not just put straight back in on the basis that you don't think he should be editing his own article. Even edits which are not simply removing material should be taken on their merits, not simply reverted because of who wrote them. TSP (talk) 22:22, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

TSP: Snoke's edits have not been to "remove libel" but rather to make a whole mass of unsourced claims about himself and about Behe & Snoke (2004):

He has also had a longstanding interest in issues of overlap of science and Christian theology, and was recently named a Fellow of the American Scientific Affiliation, which is a society for philosophy and theology of science. He has written several articles for their journal, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith. He is licensed to preach in the Presbyterian Church in America, and a leader at City Reformed Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh. He has been outspoken in defending "old earth creationism", a view which affirms that God created the world and life through miraculous means, but the earth is billions of years old and animal life has been changing and dying over this time as indicated by geology (sometimes also called a "day-age" view). In 2006 he published a book aimed at persuading young-earth creationists that this position is not heterodox. He also published a high school science curriculum in 2003 which covers many science-faith issues in addition to giving quantitative teaching of high school physics.

...Snoke's contribution was an analytical mathematical model (presented in an appendix) which confirmed that the numerical results of Behe presented in the paper are general consequences of the assumptions. The general, and somewhat surprising, mathematical result is that doubling the population size does not necessarily reduce the average time for a multiple-mutation change by one half-- nonequilibrium effects enter in which can make the time scale depend only weakly on the population size.

That was part of his edits. Another part of them was to remove or tone down content which he believed was unfair, as he explained:
The present version does not read "neutrally" at all but instead uses words like "debunked" without any citations. It is fair to say the paper is controversial, perhaps makes simplistic assumptions, and that the Discovery has over-hyped it, but it is not fair to present it as "debunked".
This removal was reverted along with his additions, citing WP:COI. TSP (talk) 23:22, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
  1. The majority of the edit was to introduce new material.
  2. The old material was not removed outright, but replaced with material that was arguably just as POV.
  3. The old material wasn't even close to being potentially libellous. Rather, it reasonably accurately reflected (albeit with perhaps imperfect accuracy as to the details) the general viewpoint of the scientific consensus -- that this paper does not represent a fair or reasonable assessment of evolutionary mechanisms (hardly surprising, given that is was performed by two ideological partisans with no scientific background in evolutionary biology).

HrafnTalkStalk 02:15, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

I have no idea what you mean by saying my bio information is "unsourced". My membership in the American Scientific Affiliation is well known-- it is a public organization-- and my publications in their journals are also public record. The same with my position in the PCA-- this is public record. Ditto with my high school curriculum. Do you mean you want me to add web links for these things? I also don't see how my first-hand information on precisely what was my contribution to the Behe paper is "unsourced".

Read WP:V: "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth." "The burden of evidence lies with the editor who adds or restores material. All quotations and any material challenged or likely to be challenged should be attributed to a reliable, published source using an inline citation." (and given that you have a WP:COI on this article, you can expect any addition you make to be "likely to be challenged".) As for it being "public record", there is a vast host of information that is in the public record that is not accessible and thus not verifiable. I took the trouble to provide a citation verifying your being a Fellow of the APS, I could not find a similar citation for the ASA. HrafnTalkStalk 15:31, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Regarding the paper, the present version is more fair, but the statement with the word "debunked" is till POV, incendiary, and unsupported by references.

Would you like to suggest a more accurate verb to express the unequivocal rejection of the paper's premises and conclusions by the scientific community? It is referenced to a critique by Ian F. Musgrave, Steve Reuland, and Reed A. Cartwright, I will quote to you their conclusion:

We began this essay with a quotation from Behe complaining that a paper describing an evolutionary simulation (Lenski et al. 2003) had "precious little real biology" in it. What we see here is that Behe and Snoke's paper is acutely vulnerable to the same criticism. A theoretical model is useful to the extent that it accurately represents or appropriately idealizes the processes that occur in the phenomenon being studied. Although it is worthwhile to investigate the importance of neutral drift, Behe and Snoke have in our opinion over-simplified the process, resulting in questionable conclusions.

Their assumptions bias their results towards more pessimistic numbers. The worst assumption is that only one target sequence can be hit to produce a new function. This is probably false under all circumstances. The notion that a newly arisen duplicate will remain selectively neutral until the modern function is firmly in place is also probably false as a general rule. Their assumption that 70% of all amino acid substitutions will destroy a protein's function is much too high. And finally, we have shown that their flagship example does not require a large multi-residue change before being selectable.

And ironically, despite these faulty assumptions, Behe and Snoke show that the probability of small multi-residue features evolving is extremely high, given the types of organisms that Behe and Snoke's model applies to. When we use more realistic assumptions, though many bad ones still remain, we find that the evolution of multi-residue features is quite likely, even when there are smaller populations and larger changes involved. In fact, the times required are within the estimated divergence times gleaned from the fossil record. We can therefore say, with confidence, that the evolution of novel genes via multi-residue changes is not problematic for evolutionary theory as currently understood.

HrafnTalkStalk 15:31, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

I have no problem with any of the above comments, and a reference to them would be appropriate rather than "numerous scientists have debunked". It is the type of measured critique I hear (and write myself) on scientific papers all the time. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dwsnoke (talk • contribs) 16:20, 10 March 2008 (UTC)


Regarding the scope of the paper, here are the conclusions of the paper, verbatim:

from abstract: "Here we model the evolution of such protein features by what we consider to be the conceptually simplest route—point mutation in duplicated genes. We show that for very large population sizes N, where at steady state in the absence of selection the population would be expected to contain one or more duplicated alleles coding for the feature, the time to fixation in the population hovers near the inverse of the point mutation rate, and varies sluggishly with the lth root of 1/N" from last paragraph: "Although large uncertainties remain, it nonetheless seems reasonable to conclude that, although gene duplication and point mutation may be an effective mechanism for exploring closely neighboring genetic space for novel functions, where single mutations produce selectable effects, this conceptually simple pathway for developing new functions is problematic when multiple mutations are required. Thus, as a rule, we should look to more complicated pathways, perhaps involving insertion, deletion, recombination, selection of intermediate states, or other mechanisms, to account for most MR protein features."

In other words, we proposed a "conceptually simple" model, ran that model, and found that it cannot explain existing results. Therefore, as we said clearly, one must look for more complicated pathways-- precisely the type of different models that the critics of the paper listed in the article propose.

In layman's terms, our model assumed no selection of intermediate states. The result shows that intermediate states must be selected for-- precisely the fourth point of the Hermodson editorial. This is an important conceptual step. There were, in fact, many people who did espouse "neutral drift" before our paper-- the idea that intermediate steps could accumulate without being selected for. So our model was not a straw man. The need to have intermediate steps selected for, in what can be called a "funnel" or "valley" in fitness space, is now a major point of discussion.

To date, no one has challenged any of the mathematical conclusions of the paper. They have challenged the assumptions, i.e. have argued that a more complicated model might work-- a point which we ourselves pointed out in the original paper. Thus the word "debunked" is out of line.

You conclude: "this conceptually simple pathway for developing new functions is problematic when multiple mutations are required." However in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, Behe admitted under cross-examination that, even with your extremely restrictive assumptions, these pathways were feasible for lifeforms such as bacteria. This is the same point that Musgrave et al make. Your mathematical numbers may be correct, but the biological conclusion you draw from them does not appear to be. HrafnTalkStalk 15:31, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

from DS: the biological conclusion of the paper is given verbatim above. Any other conclusions were those of others, or of Behe on his own.

I wonder if the person(s) writing this summary have read the original paper, or are just reacting to anything with Behe's name on it. I would not have signed anything that said "we have disproved evolution" or "this proves irreducible complexity." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.195.77.64 (talk) 14:39, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Yet Behe also stated at Dover that "as I indicated in my direct testimony, that I regard my paper with Professor David Snoke as to be arguing for the irreducible complexity of things such as complex protein binding sites." I would also ask the following question: why would two scientists, neither of whom has any legitimate scientific background in evolutionary biology, both of whom have a theological axe to grind, produce such a paper, with such unrealistic assumptions, and misrepresented conclusions, if not as an anti-evolution canard? HrafnTalkStalk 15:31, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

from DS: saying something "argues for" or "supports" is standard in science and is quite different from saying "irrefutable proves". The assumptions we made were in fact being made by some others in the literature at the time, whether reasonable or not. Hindsight is always perfect.

[Edit conflict with Guettarda's 'simultaneous' response HrafnTalkStalk 15:31, 10 March 2008 (UTC) ]

from DS: I can tell you exactly why I got involved, and you can take it or leave it (and of course, mysteriously, possibly I am not David Snoke at all!) I was participating on a web forum with Michael Behe, and he made a claim that in numerical models, the rate of fixation of multiple-mutation changes did not go linearly with population number. This struck me as suspect, so I checked it out both by doing my own numerical simulations and then writing down an analytical calculation. I found to my surprise that my numbers agreed with his conclusion. So I agreed to add the appendix of the paper. In my mind, this is the best type of science-- when people who originally disagree work through their disagreements and then come to agreement, at least on one point, and write a paper together. As a physicist, what interested me is the general result of sublinearlity, not the details of a particular biological system. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dwsnoke (talk • contribs) 16:41, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Given that neither you nor Behe have any expertise in the area, you will forgive me for questioning whether your eventual agreement represents "the best type of science", rather than simply somebody who knows a little about biology convincing somebody who knows less. Mathematics is only scientifically useful when the assumptions that go into it, and the conclusions that are drawn from it, are legitimate (neither of which appear to be the case in your paper). Otherwise it is only of legitimate interest in the context of inquiry into pure mathematics. HrafnTalkStalk 17:07, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

from DS: you will forgive me if I ask what your own background is, so I know who I am talking to. In regard to the conclusions, Dan Fisher, a biophysicist at Harvard, gave an invited talk at the APS March meeting in which he came to the same conclusions from numerical models, namely, that multiple unselected steps cannot get from here to there. I referenced his talk in an earlier change but this was also deleted-- why, since it is a verifiable reference? And forgive me if I tell you than in physics, drawing general conclusions from "toy" systems is indeed often very interesting, even if the toy model turns out not to model the thing you thought it did. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dwsnoke (talk • contribs) 17:19, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

I will forgive you (though this type of question is generally considered bad manners on wikipedia). My degrees are in fields unrelated to evolutionary biology. I am not a major contributor to this article, but merely keep a watch over it to ensure that contributions to it are reliably sourced, repair broken links, remove vandalism, etc. You might consider me to be the 'janitor'. This article doesn't get much notice or traffic, so if you want to argue your point with an editor who's a genuine biologist, you'll probably have to either go over to Talk:Evolution (both a more heavily populated article, and one with more experts on biology) & politely ask if one will come over here, or call a Request for Comment. I remember the Fisher citation ("Bull. APS 51, R7 3 (2006)") -- I attempted to look it up when you first posted it, but found it to be too cryptic and could find nothing on it on the APS website or in Google Scholar. What you should have done was provide a link: [1]. You can also find templates for formatting journal references at WP:CITET. HrafnTalkStalk 18:07, 10 March 2008 (UTC)
I have no idea what you mean by saying my bio information is "unsourced"
Material is "unsourced" if it is not attributed to a reliable, third party source: see Wikipedia:Reliable sources
Do you mean you want me to add web links for these things?
Adding references would be useful - preferably here on the Talk page
I also don't see how my first-hand information on precisely what was my contribution to the Behe paper is "unsourced".
There's a deeper problem here, and that is one of verifiability. Wikipedia does not accept first-hand contributions or original reporting. In addition, of course, there's no way to verify that you actually are David Snoke.
Thus the word "debunked" is out of line
It's the term that has been widely used to refer to the paper. While it's been a while since I read the paper (and the responses to it), if I remember correctly, it used a non-selectionist model to make selectionist conclusions. So it wasn't that the mathematical conclusions were wrong, but rather that the premise was flawed. Guettarda (talk) 14:54, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

from DS: Again, "widely used"-- where? In the scientific literature, or on polemic anti-ID websites?

Again I ask, would you like to suggest a more accurate verb to express the unequivocal rejection of the paper's premises and conclusions by the scientific community? HrafnTalkStalk 17:07, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

from DS: you keep saying there is this vast body of unequivocal rejection, but all I see in the above is the Lynch article and one other article. The statement "Other scientists have debunked the work" is pure POV without references, and "debunked" is a loaded term. I would have no objection to a statement like "Other scientists [refs] have rejected the assumptions of the paper as too simplistic". —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dwsnoke (talk • contribs) 17:42, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

I included a link to the American Scientific Affiliation in my bio info but this was deleted. So how is this unsourced? I would be happy to add links to my ASA articles, but this would seem to be more, rather than less, self-editing.

My name is Edward Davis, and I am a member of the governing Council of the ASA. I am on the road, so you cannot verify my present IP address, but if you go to http://www.asa3.org/ASA/newsletter/novdec06.pdf, you will see that David Snoke was elected a Fellow of ASA in 2006, along with Francis Collins, Robert Kaita, and John Bloom. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.137.139.118 (talk) 17:40, 10 March 2008 (UTC)
The link was all we needed -- a WP:RS. Thanks. I will add this to the article. HrafnTalkStalk 18:18, 10 March 2008 (UTC)
You provided a link to their article, not to any page verifying any association you might have with them. HrafnTalkStalk 17:07, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Here are references to Dan Fisher's work (he is now at Stanford).

"Beneficial mutation-selection balance and the effect of linkage on positive selection"

Desai,-Michael-M Fisher,-Daniel-S

Genetics-. 2007; 176(3): 1759-1798

When beneficial mutations are rare, they accumulate by a series of selective sweeps. But when they are common, many beneficial mutations will occur before any can fix, so there will be many different mutant lineages in the population concurrently. In an asexual population, these different mutant lineages interfere and not all can fix simultaneously. In addition, further beneficial mutations can accumulate in mutant lineages while these are still a minority of the population. In this article, we analyze the dynamics of such multiple mutations and the interplay between multiple mutations and interference between clones. These result in substantial variation in fitness accumulating within a single asexual population. The amount of variation is determined by a balance between selection,which destroys variation, and beneficial mutations, which create more. The behavior depends in a subtle way on the population parameters: the population size, the beneficial mutation rate, and the distribution of the fitness increments of the potential beneficial mutations. The mutation-selection balance leads to a continually evolving population with a steady-state fitness variation. This variation increases logarithmically with both population size and mutation rate and sets the rate at which the population accumulates beneficial mutations, which thus also grows only logarithmically with population size and mutation rate. These results imply that mutator phenotypes are less effective in larger asexual populations. They also have consequences for the advantages (or disadvantages) of sex via the Fisher-Muller effect; these are discussed briefly.

"The speed of evolution and maintenance of variation in asexual populations"

Desai,-Michael-M Fisher,-Daniel-S Murray,-Andrew-W

Current-Biology. 2007; 17(5): 385-394

Background: The rate at which beneficial mutations accumulate determines how fast asexual populations evolve, but this is only partially understood. Some recent clonal-interference models suggest that evolution in large asexual populations is limited because smaller beneficial mutations are outcompeted by larger beneficial mutations that occur in different lineages within the same population. This analysis assumes that the important mutations fix one at a time; it ignores multiple beneficial mutations that occur in the lineage of an earlier beneficial mutation, before the first mutation in the series can fix. We focus on the effects of such multiple mutations.Results: Our analysis predicts that the variation in fitness maintained by a continuously evolving population increases as the logarithm of the population size and logarithm of the mutation rate and thus yields a similar logarithmic increase in the speed of evolution. To test these predictions, we evolved asexual budding yeast in glucose-limited media at a range of population sizes and mutation rates. Conclusions: We find that their evolution is dominated by the accumulation of multiple mutations of moderate effect. Our results agree with our theoretical predictions and are inconsistent with the one-by-one fixation of mutants assumed by recent clonal-interference analysis.

Note that he concludes that the rate of fixation is logarithmic with population size, which is even slower than the dependence we deduced, which is power law with population size. His work has not received the same attention as ours because he has not been associated with the ID movement. I am adding a statement on the comparison of the papers-- with references. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dwsnoke (talk • contribs) 18:44, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

from DS: I am not opposed to most of the present form of the article, except the following sentence: "Other scientists have debunked the work, pointing out that not only has it been shown that a supposedly irreducibly complex structure can evolve, but that it can do so within a reasonable time even subject to unrealistically harsh restrictions, and noting that Behe & Snoke's paper does not properly include natural selection and genetic redundancy." This sentence violates your own policy of being unverifiable-- where are the references to scientists in the literature saying they have "debunked" this paper? Also, the listed things which have been shown (again, without reference) do not have anything to do with the subject of the paper. This sentence is a broad generality POV in contrast to the other more specific criticisms in the article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dwsnoke (talk • contribs) 21:42, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Sentence removed under Wikipedia policy: "Unsourced or poorly sourced contentious material about living persons should be removed immediately. Do not tag it; remove it. For more information, see the section on poorly sourced contentious material in the Biography of Living Persons policy." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Fact) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dwsnoke (talk • contribs) 22:43, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

How is that a statement "about a living person"? A paper isn't a living person, you can't libel a publication. How does BLP apply here? Guettarda (talk) 01:04, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
Also, please stop editing this article. Guettarda (talk) 01:05, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Behe and Snoke (2004)

I've put a citation-needed tag on Behe's statement that ID/complexity material was removed at the referees' request. That certainly plays into some of the controversy on this page and ought to be removed if it's not sourced. I've also added this section on the Talk page to organize it more systematically. --TimScH (talk) 15:57, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Sources discussing Behe and Snoke (2004)

As far as I can tell, these are the only relevant sources that have been unearthed to date:

  • Sources containing explicit criticism and/or contradiction:
    • Lynch
    • Hermodson editorial
    • Musgrave et al
    • Masel
    • Afriat et al
  • Sources alleged by Snoke to be supportive, but containing no explicit mention of B&S:
    • M.M. Desai and D.S. Fisher (2007)[2]
    • M.M. Desai, D.S. Fisher, and A.W. Murray (2007)[3]

If the latter two are to be used in the article, I would suggest that we need some expert opinion as to how supportive they can be characterised as being, without running afoul of WP:SYNTH. If Snoke and supporters are adament that they should be included, I would suggest calling a WP:RFC on the issue.

Additionally, are there any further relevant sources? HrafnTalkStalk 04:32, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

from DS: no statement was made that Desai and Fisher reference the Behe and Snoke paper. The point was (1) a summary of the mathematical result of the paper, which keeps getting deleted despite the fact that this is perfectly verifiable (e.g. from the abstract, quoted above) and (2) Desai and Fisher came to a similar conclusion, independently. I was at the March meeting talk where Fisher presented these results and said "if there is no selection of the intermediate steps, you can't get there".

Your policy of saying that I should not edit the article is basically saying that someone else can post a resume for me on the web, which comes up in searches higher than my own web page, and I am not allowed to challenge it. Do you see the issue-- anyone can write a hostile review of anyone else, and that person is not allowed to correct, as they have "COI"! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dwsnoke (talk • contribs) 13:55, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

  1. As "no statement was made that Desai and Fisher reference the Behe and Snoke paper", the claim that they came to a "similar result" to your paper is most probably impermissible synethesis. From my, admittedly inexpert vantage point, it would appear that D&F were analysing a very different evolutionary environment (one with such an abundance of favourable mutations that they tended to interfere with each other's becoming fixed in the population) from the one you and Behe were assuming, and any similarity in results would therefore appear to be coincidental. However, if you are certain that a legitimate similarity exists, then we can call a WP:RFC to gain more expert views on the degree of similarity. The existence of the papers is verifiable, the similarity of the results is considerably less so.
  2. Your edits were reverted because they contained statements that were not verifiable prima facie from the cited sources. You should not have been editing this article at all (as has been pointed out to you on numerous occasions), so any controversial edit you make will be reverted as a matter of course.
  3. Your ability to control what is said about you necessarilly took a nose-dive when you allowed your name to be added to an article which, on its principal author's admission, is a pro-ID article. You would not expect to be permitted to censor and rewrite information on you contained by an encyclopaedia in your university's library, why should you expect such a 'right' here? If you disagree with WP:COI, then you have two choices: (1) lobby to get it changed; or (2) set up a competing wiki. Simply ignoring the rules because you don't like them isn't an option.

HrafnTalkStalk 14:40, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Your policy of saying that I should not edit the article is basically saying that someone else can post a resume for me on the web, which comes up in searches higher than my own web page, and I am not allowed to challenge it.
You're absolutely allowed to challenge it. But you shouldn't edit it and most definitely shouldn't be whitewashing it. We're supposed to report fairly on reliable third-party sources. If there are sources out there that we have missed, or if our reporting on those sources is unbalanced, then you should point it out. We can't just add or remove information based on your say-so: you have chosen to associate yourself with a group which seems to exist simply to misrepresent reality. While that in itself is no reason to doubt you, it's also no reason to trust you. Guettarda (talk) 18:37, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] RfC: Does Desai & Fisher (2007) and Desai et al (2007) support Behe & Snoke (2004)?

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.

A summary of the debate may be found at the bottom of the page.


To what extent can Desai & Fisher (2007) and Desai et al (2007) be characterised as supportive of Behe & Snoke (2004)? Are the situation analysed, results, and conclusions drawn, sufficiently similar that the article can state that the former two articles draw "similar results" to the latter article (or some similar statement), without violating WP:SYNTH or misrepresenting them? HrafnTalkStalk 15:03, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Unless one paper explicitly references the other (which they don't appear to), we would need a separate source making this connection, otherwise it is indeed a clear original research synthesis. WP:SYN is pretty clear.
Of course, if Mr Snoke put something on his blog or similar making this connection, this could be sufficient to put something like "David Snoke has stated that...", but obviously, regardless of his qualifications, Mr Snoke is not a third-party source on his own research, so this would only be a source for his opinion that there is a link. TSP (talk) 16:21, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

from DS: Let me spell out how Fisher's work has similar conclusion. 1) Again, though this has been deleted many times, the main conclusion of our paper was a simple one (which is verifiable, though it has been deleted): If intermediate steps are not selected for, then the rate of getting a multiple-step mutation, in which only the final complete whole is selected for, goes sublinearly with population size. This means if beneficial mutations are low probability, that you must have truly vast population sizes (such as occur with bacteria or phages) to get reasonable evolution speeds. 2) Fisher and Desai assume the same at the outset of their paper in Genetics-- when beneficial mutations are rare, evolution occurs by selection of each intermediate step ("successional mutations"). This is the same scenario advocated by several critics of our paper-- that all the intermediate steps are selected for, and therefore our model of assuming non-selected intermediate states is not realistic. As I have said before, that is an important conclusion because some people were indeed proposing that intermediate steps could be accumulated without selection. 3) Fisher and Desai go on to different regime, in which the beneficial mutation rate is turned up higher. In this case you might assume that the rate of fixation would begin to increase linearly with population size. However, they show that there is an "interference" effect which still keeps the rate sublinear, in fact logarithmic, which is very slow. The result of both their work and ours is that one cannot make simple extrapolations, that if it takes 1000 years to evolve a trait in a population with 1 million organisms, then it takes 100 years for a population with 10 million organisms. (People do make that kind of statement all the time.) 4) Of course in both models you can get any type of evolution you want if you turn up the selection benefit or the population size enough.

I am done editing the article. It is reasonably balanced in its present form (which might change tomorrow). I am a newcomer to Wiki so perhaps have not followed the rules, but it seems to me besides a COI rule you need a ATG rule-- "axe to grind" rule. Clearly some people have an interest in slamming all people associated with ID, and so are going after a person who is a Fellow of the APS with dozens of papers with well over 1000 citations, and referee and editorialist for Science and Nature magazines, like you might go after some polemic blogger. Anyone can tell you that this process bears no resemblance to any real reference work-- e.g. Who's Who did indeed contact me to ask for my biographical info, and did not presume to write about me without allowing my input, and I can't imagine writing an encyclopedia article or maganize article about a living person without contacting that person for verification. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dwsnoke (talk • contribs) 19:54, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

  1. It was deleted because you have a conflict of interest. What part of "Wikipedia's conflict of interest guidelines strongly advise that editors do not directly edit articles on topics where they have a close personal or business connection" did you fail to understand.
  2. It is NOT verifiable that "the main conclusion" of the paper is the mathematical result that you quote. Your paper does not include an explicit "conclusion" section, but rather a "results" and a "discussion" section. This allows you to claim that the limited mathematical results are the "main conclusion" while allowing your co-author to claim that the paper's conclusions support irreducible complexity. Thus either claimed "conclusion" is impermissible WP:SYNTH and would be deleted even if you weren't conflicted.
    • I just took a closer look at your paper. At the end of the abstract it states: "We conclude that, in general, to be fixed in 108 generations, the production of novel protein features that require the participation of two or more amino acid residues simply by multiple point mutations in duplicated genes would entail population sizes of no less than 109." Likewise at the end of the 'discussion' section it states: "Although large uncertainties remain, it nonetheless seems reasonable to conclude that, although gene duplication and point mutation may be an effective mechanism for exploring closely neighboring genetic space for novel functions, where single mutations produce selectable effects, this conceptually simple pathway for developing new functions is problematic when multiple mutations are required." It would thus appear to these views, not your mathematical result, that are the paper's "main conclusion". HrafnTalkStalk 02:41, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
  3. Your representations of Desai appears to be WP:SYNTH, so I see little point in arguing about them. Unless and until some editors who are biologists turn up to (1) support your interpretation & (2) state that this interpretation is sufficiently obvious as not to be WP:SYNTH, I have no reason to accept that your claims should be included in the article.
  4. If you edit the article again your edits will, most probably, be reverted. "Wikipedia's conflict of interest guidelines strongly advise that editors do not directly edit articles on topics where they have a close personal or business connection"

HrafnTalkStalk 02:21, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Outside RfC comment: unless the papers themselves note that their results are similar (which one would think they would do if they had reviewed the literature and truly came to similar results), then this looks like original synthesis. Please see the example at WP:SYN. Using one source to comment on another source without previous analysis tying them together is not allowed. If, on the other hand, a reliably published third party source noted the similarity between the two, then we could note it here, but Wikipedia is not a forum for original research. Cool Hand Luke 20:35, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

  • Comment - The study by Dessi, Fisher and Murry, as well as the study by Desai and Fisher are of the relative speed at which multiple beneficial mutations will establish in a population, and if these will fix successively, or occur simultaneously in a single line. This is clearly distinct from the Behe and Snoke study, which examined a set of dependent mutations that only produce a selective advantage when they appear as a combination (ignoring the effects of genetic drift, but that's a personal observation). These two sets of studies are independent in the questions they ask and the conclusions they make, they therefore do not support or refute Behe and Snoke at all. Tim Vickers (talk) 22:06, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
  • Comment - What the fuck? The papers are miles apart. Behe and Snoke bizarrely focus on a single mutation, whereas in the case of Desai et al, the mutation target is the entire genome. These situations are not analagous to start off with. And - where is clonal interference in the model presented in B&S's paper? I can't find any trace of it. So what makes it appropriate to compare these two papers? Graft | talk 11:31, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
    • The claim of similarity was made by Snoke himself. I was highly skeptical, but as he was insistent & I'm not a biologist, I thought it best to put it to an RfC. Thanks for helping clarify the matter. HrafnTalkStalk 12:26, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
      • Well, he's not a biologist either, and seems to be about as well able to judge similarity as you are. Graft | talk 13:54, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
  • Comment: This is original research. Snoke needs to publish someplace this claim associating the two studies because he can't use the wikipedia to publish novel claims. The Desai paper's "support" of the Behe/Snoke conclusion is not readily apparent. The title of Desai's work is "Beneficial Mutation–Selection Balance and the Effect of Linkage on Positive Selection". Its focus is on estimated number of generations involved in a large population where there are large numbers of different beneficial mutations generated, each one conferring a selective benefit, each essentially "competing" for fixity. Behe and Snoke's paper explores the situation where "non-selected" (ie non-beneficial) mutations linger in a large population long enough to where they can be (fortuitiously) piggy-backed with a subsequent random mutation(s) for which only in their combined effect does the resulting beneficial trait conferred by the "combination" of mutations actually carry advantage in selection. Findings based on beneficial mutations can't be interchanged with findings of non-beneficial mutations. It would seem the two studies are looking at fundamentally different particulars. Professor marginalia (talk) 01:54, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Summary: Outside commenters could not discern the 'similarity' that Snoke insisted existed between these papers, and further were of the opinion that claims of this similarity constitute impermissible WP:OR/WP:SYN. HrafnTalkStalk 03:02, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.