Talk:Evolutionary history of life

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Good article Evolutionary history of life has been listed as one of the Natural sciences good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can delist it, or ask for a reassessment.
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The page is currently under construction. it is requested to discuss before making any changes. Sushant gupta 09:24, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Further reading

Why is the "Further Reading" list here only a duplicate of the FR section of Evolution ? -PhDP (talk) 01:46, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

Ah, PhDP, thanks for asking the question. The Further Reading section here should be cleaned up. And I propose that we add The Ancestor's Tale to this article's Further Reading section. Please see Talk:Evolution#Article on evolutionary rate of change. Fred Hsu 01:52, 12 August 2007 (UTC)
You again !? :) I think we should start the Further Reading section of this article from scratch, the duplication is totally unjustified, most books have nothing to do with the evolution of life on earth... and the External Links section is no better. I think we should;
  1. Remove all the material from the Further Reading section, with the notable exception of "The Major Transitions in Evolution", which is really a book both about evolution and the history of life.
  2. Add Dawkins' Ancestor's Tale
  3. Add Richard Cowen's History of Life (4th ed.)
-PhDP (talk) 02:46, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

It's done. Fred Hsu 14:08, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

thanks a lot for your contribs. can you please add up some of the content under other biological related section such as evolution of asymmetry and evolution of sex.

for a time being i am removing human evolution section. thanks, Sushant gupta 11:51, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Problem with article history

Hi there, there is a problem with the article as it stands. Much of the text appears to have been copied and pasted from other articles without linking the articles concerned in the edit summary. Please read Wikipedia:Merging_and_moving_pages#Full-content_paste_merger as a guide to do this in the future. Tim Vickers 17:17, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

I asked about how to deal with this at the help desk and they said we have to list the source articles here and in the edit history. I recognize the text I wrote in the Evolution article, where else was material copied from? Tim Vickers 19:29, 31 August 2007 (UTC)
the main articles mentioned above each section except some of them are the links i followed in order to write this article. I also took some of the content from the page Evolution. thanks, Sushant gupta 11:57, 1 September 2007 (UTC)
This doesn't need to be deleted, I just need to cite the articles used in the edit history of this article and on the talk page. Since this will be much easier for you to do than me, could you put a list here? Thanks Tim Vickers 13:45, 1 September 2007 (UTC)
That's great, I've added them to the edit history as well, so this article is now fully GFDL compliant. Tim Vickers 03:15, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
Hi. Would it be helpful for the general understanding of all to include what appears to me to be a good latin motto explaining somehow more what Evolution of Life means to Evolutionists:

VITA ORIUNDUS SUBSTANCIA FORTUITO : Life originates by chance from substance or mater. (Latin expression by : George F. Thomson, c.2008) Kind Regards: GeorgeFThomson (talk) 04:30, 11 March 2008 (UTC)


List of links followed in order to generate this article-

[edit] Good article review

[edit] Images

[edit] Early signs of life

  • Y Done Why are so many words in quotes? That doesn't seem necessary. Panspermia, error, food, and successful, in particular. Strains also seems odd unless they weren't actually strains but something similar.
  • Y Done Why is genetic code italicized?
  • Y Done "The first simple, sea dwelling organic structures appeared about 3,400 million years ago." - How do you know?
  • Y Done"It is considered that they may have formed when certain chemical (organic) molecules joined together." - Considered by whom?
truely speaking i don't know who considered it but i have added ref to it. Sushant gupta 14:14, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Evolution of life

  • Y Done "Amphibians first appeared around 300 million years ago, followed by early amniotes, then mammals around 200 million years ago and birds around 100 million years ago (both from "reptile"-like lineages)." - How do we know?

[edit] Life before Cambrian

  • Y Done "but carbon in 3800 million year old", "3460 million years" - Shouldn't those be 3.8 billion and 3.46 or 3.5 billion?
  • Y Done "Excepting a few contested reports of much older forms from Texas and India, the first complex multicelled life forms seem to have appeared roughly 600 Ma." - A reference about the contested reports would be good. The rest of this section could also use referencing.
Mesozoic life
  • Y Done This section is completely unreferenced.
Cenozoic life
  • Y Done Why is "age of new life" emboldened?
Late Devonian extinction
  • Y Done This section needs additional references.
  • Y DoneThe (McGhee 1666) needs to be footnoted.
Triassic-Jurassic extinction event
  • Y Done This section lacks citation.
Holocene extinction event
  • Y Done Why is "Sixth Extinction" emboldened?
  • Y Done Additional citation needed in second half.
Prokaryote
  • Y Done Why is "protobionts" emboldened?
  • Y Done Needs citation.
  • Y Done Why more emboldened terms?
Eukaryote
  • Y Done "Knoll (1992)" - That needs to be footnoted and expanded.
    This is still in the body. It shouldn't be. And there's nothing in the references to explain what Knoll (1992) refers to.

[edit] Evolution of asymmetry

  • Y Done Lacks citation.
Deleted. Tim Vickers 18:53, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] References

  • Y Done The style of referencing needs to be consistent. Currently there are both footnotes and Harvard referencing. Also, the Harvard references don't have the information with them. Author and year is not enough. Title, publisher, etc. need to be included.
    The Knoll reference is a Harvard style reference. Both it a ref 57 (McGhee 1996) need to be expanded with additional information. Author last name and year of publication is not nearly enough information.
  • The reference with Schopf, J. has a 404 error. It is currently hidden. It needs to be fixed or replaced.

[edit] Section headers

Y Done For the subsections that are emboldened with ; rather than subsectioned with === or ====, is there any reason for this? I think it would be more appropriate to make headers so that the article is more easily editable with tabs for each of these sections. I have to leave off here for now. I'll return later. LaraLove 19:27, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] GA on hold

Sorry for the break. As I completed the article, I added more issues above. I've noticed there are a lot of sections missing citation. One per paragraph is kind of what's preferred as a minimum, although there's no set number or anything like that. Without citation it reads like original reseach. Normally, I would fail an article for having this many citation issues, however, because the article was on hold for so long, I'm inclined to cut a break here. Hold periods are for seven days, do you think all of these issues can be corrected in that time? Lara❤Love 16:12, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

I'd also like to add that I just looked over the FAC discussion and while the article still needs some work, it is obvious that a lot of hard work has gone into it and that's something to be proud of. Keep up the good work! Lara❤Love 16:16, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

There's only a few small things left. I went through and did a little more tweaking. Very good article. Just fix the few ref issues and that's it. I'll list it. :) Regards, Lara❤Love 19:02, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] GA pass

This article has been listed at WP:GA. Thank you for all of your hard work. In improving this article, you have improved Wikipedia. Regards, Lara❤Love 14:29, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Structure and questions

Hi, a couple of comments on this article. Firstly, the structure strikes me as very odd! Why not introduce the important concepts, then lay things out chronologically? It seems odd that the "three domain system" and "evolution of sex" are placed at the end of this "history". Wouldn't it make more sense to introduce them earlier? I'm not really sure where the "Three domain system" fits into the scope of this article, either. I'd consider either linking it in better, or removing it entirely.

Also, Funisia ought surely to be mentioned in the "Evolution of Sex" section. The opinion that selection pressures can act on levels above the individual (i.e. the "clade") does not, as I understand it, hold much popularity. It's probably worth providing an indication of this in the article (and some citations backing up the suggestion of "group selection").

There are a few other little things I'd have addressed before offering this article for GA status: for example, the inconsistent introduction of mya (why introduce it half way through the article, then not use it again? Better to use Ma, the first time "Million years ago" is used, or just write it out in full each time.) Maybe offer a date for all 6 extinction events? And, the Cambrian explosion was certainly NOT an extinction event! Worth mentioning, of course. But could you make it fit better into the article, rather than just copying the lede of the Cambrian explosion article?

Thanks

Verisimilus T 17:33, 18 April 2008 (UTC)