Bill being Bill. No more need be said.
Hi Neil
It is possible that anyone is fooling themselves. Why do you think he in wrong in questioning viability of common descent of certain types of plants.?
What’s the Over/Under on the number of posts till we get the Howe Diagram?
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What term? “Lab colleague” or “lab partner”? I already told you that the phrase “lab colleague” was not commonly used by undergrad science students and that the term “lab partner” is very frequently used. You want examples showing the phrase is common?
I got 3/4 of a million hits on “lab partner”; I got 2,610 hits for “lab colleague”. Here are a some of the ones for “lab partner”:
An example I found in about 20 seconds, from a school not far down the road from your own:
Another example, referring to American schools:
And there is this article, discussing both graduate and undergraduate “lab partners”:
I could go on and on. I was correct when I said that it’s more common for undergrad students to talk about their “lab partner” than their “lab colleague” or “colleague”. I knew this anyway, without using Google, from personal experience at one university and talking to science students at others, but the Google search confirms my generalization.
Rubbish. I said I wanted opinions from more than Harshman, not that Harshman’s opinion was disqualified for dishonesty or incompetence. If you have any knowledge of academia at all (which I’m beginning to doubt), you know that when one is trying to get a sense of current scientific opinion on a subject, one consults many more people than one.
The answer to that should be clear from context. I am not a phylogeneticist, and I do not know whether observed divergences in trees are within the range predicted by current phylogenetic theory. I made no claim about what anyone else knows, or claims to know. But I do know that Buggs’s talk claims, or strongly implies, that the observed divergences in trees in at least some cases fall outside of the range predicted by theory. And if Buggs is right, current phylogeneticists have some ‘splainin’ to do. I don’t see what you find difficult to understand about this.
You have not demonstrated the existence of even a single lie in the talk. Errors there may be – though you haven’t demonstrated any of those, either. But lies? Point to a statement that is a “lie” as opposed to an error, an overgeneralization, etc. But then again, I am talking to a man who thinks that blocking traffic by illegally parking downtown constitutes an “insurrection”, so I suppose I have to take into account your tendency to stretch the meaning of words beyond recognition.
I believe that he would be quite willing to modify that absolute statement to a qualified one, i.e., evolutionary biologists expect that conflicts between trees will not be significant. I’ve already had the discussion about “significant” divergence with Rumraket, and don’t intend to have it again with you.
No one here is a qualified expert in phylogenetics, except possibly Harshman and Felsenstein and Hunt (regarding plants). Hunt and Felsenstein have not replied on this topic. The other people replying to me have no publications in that field and are not regarded by the biological/genetics world as experts in it. They have general background in life sciences but not expertise in this area of evolutionary theory.
Americocentrism again. Why do you assume that what is true in the US is true everywhere? And why do you assume that what is true in your little corner of midwestern America is true everywhere in the USA? Have you written to faculty in New England, for example, and asked them if students ever call them Dr. or Professor? Have you done a proper survey to determine how often it happens? You make generalizations without supplying data; what happened to your much-vaunted empiricism?
So when you were an undergrad, and you wanted to address your professor, say named Robert Smith, did you say, “Bob, what about the effects of drift?” You just presumed to call him by his first name without asking if he was comfortable with that? If so, I’d say you were a pretty cheeky undergrad.
And is that what your undergrad students did, come up to you and say, “Hey, John, what about this?” Without first asking whether such familiar address to a teacher was appropriate?
For the record, at my university, and in all universities where I knew a fair number of the students, it was normal in both Sciences and Arts for undergrads to call faculty members “Dr.” One could also call them “Professor”, since technically that was what they were, by job title (unless they were only Lecturers), but “Dr.” was more common. Most faculty seemed utterly indifferent whether they were addressed as Doctor or Professor. I remember one, however, who was Oxford-trained, who did not like “Professor” because it sounded too German to him. So everyone called him Dr. and he never complained.
You could instruct your students to call you anything you liked, but they certainly were not in error to call you “Dr.”, and you weren’t “correcting” them by saying they shouldn’t use that term, since the term was in fact correct. You were merely indicating a personal preference. And that’s fine; but other teachers elsewhere aren’t bound by your preference. I sweated great drops of blood to earn my doctorate, and I was quite happy to be addressed by that title, since I had earned it. (But I wouldn’t have objected to “Mr.” if students preferred that. I would have objected to the presumptuous use of my given name.)
In any case, by seizing on my incidental use of “Professor” in the preface to my question, you as usual are picking at a very tiny incidental point, as you usually do. You have not addressed the substance of my questions.
I note that you have declined my request for a connected prose exposition of the whole process by which an undergrad comes to be working in a lab. You continue to respond with scattershot replies. And even those leave most of my questions unanswered.
You also have not answered my question about “one’s own lab”. Did you mean the student has his (or her) own lab? It’s his lab, as opposed to the lab of someone senior that he’s working with? You wrote very unclearly. And that has been your pattern all along.
By the way, which universities did you teach at? Since you’ve abandoned your several pseudonyms and are now retired, and hence beyond the reach of any possible consequences from your former employers, I presume it could do you no harm to tell us.
I made no such pretense. You are the one who constantly speaks as the voice of what Science and Scientists are about. I simply stated a fact, which you cannot change: I’ve never met or heard of any undergrads who do unpaid research. I knew the entire Biochemistry class at my school very well, socialized constantly with them for four years, heard them talking about every aspect of their programs and their plans for what they wanted to do after graduation; never once did any of them mention doing any research. They did their labs for their courses, but none ever spoke of doing any other research. I also knew a good number of the Biology majors quite well, and none of them spoke of doing any research either, or of any of their fellow students who were doing such research. And of the people I knew who went on to Ph.D.s in either Biology or Biochemistry, none had done undergrad research of the sort you describe. I’m not denying that it happens, but it didn’t happen where I was. Whether you believe me or not, I couldn’t care less.
Perhaps. But if so, he’s probably fooled himself into thinking the CONCLUSION of oogity-boogity is sound, and that it merely lacks persuasive evidence which will surely be on the next train. He cannot possibly have fooled himself into thinking that the almost-a-point he was almost-making in this talk was of any value at all except in fooling others.
And that, of course, is strong evidence of dishonesty. It shows a careful, conscious rhetorical strategy to put across false ideas without having a nice quotable nugget of falsehood.
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I agree with you about the part of Buggs’s talk on John’s Gospel etc. I don’t think his argument is very strong. (I don’t mean there is no strong case to be made for Christianity, but only that his particular argument here is not very strong.) You will note that I did not highlight that part of his talk as “interesting” to me.
Regarding your other comments on Buggs: (1) Yes, he does refer to Penny, but obviously he does not interpret Penny in the same way that you do, and as I haven’t read Penny, I’m not about to step in and act as referee; (2) I suspect (for reasons that are not relevant here) that Buggs will soon reply to critics of this lecture, not here but elsewhere, and so I’m going to wait until I hear his clarifications. He may well resolve the confusion resulting from the two slightly different statements by Dawkins, and he may well make his statement about what phylogenetic theory predicts much clearer, and he may well specify what counts as “too much” divergence between trees. Until then, I am not going to try to speak for him or guess what he might say to some of the objections here.
I don’t mind that he personally questions it. But he should then be doing the research to further investigate.
He should be more cautious about publicly questioning it without more evidence than he has.
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That is exactly what I would assume about any research by undergrads. But I have seen no clear statement to that effect from Mercer. And he certainly muddies the waters by speaking about “one’s own” lab, as if an undergraduate student would be working solo on, or would be the boss of, a research project. What you are saying makes perfect sense to me, but Mercer’s remarks are not clear. I’ve asked him for a paragraph stating how the process would work, but I doubt he will provide one. But you needn’t worry about that; Mercer and I have communication barriers that go back more than 10 years, and doubtless are caused by a clash of personalities. I thank you for trying to provide more information on this.
I teach IB biology to high school students and part of the curriculum is evidence of evolution. We discuss some really basic concepts of phylogeny such as the use of DNA and amino acid sequences as tools to examine relationships. We also talk about the need to consider more than one gene to determine this (curriculum limits this discussion to this level)
Harping on exact replication of the tree, followed by looking at species that are hybridizing and claiming evolution is truly in question is pretty much jumping the shark.
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That is indeed a really good article, largely credited to @John_Harshman .
What do you mean by “possibly”?
I, on the other hand, have read Penny, and I know that it says what @Rumraket thinks it does. I don’t actually know what Buggs thinks it means, because he doesn’t actually say.
But did he actually question it? Again, it all depends on whether you hear the dog whistles.
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Correction: “except Harshman and possibly Felsenstein and Hunt”. I was writing loosely to indicate I wasn’t sure about all members of the trio, but now I’ve made it more precise. Sorry for any inadvertent offense.
How was it Americentric, exactly? Read what you were allegedly responding to. You’ll stoop to just about any fabrication to launch an attack, won’t you?
I didn’t. Read that first sentence.
Only my undergraduate experience was in the midwest. Another fabrication!
Why would I write them and ask such a ludicrous question? None of my friends who have positions in New England are formal.
It’s still there. What happened to observing the Ninth Commandment?
Yep and everyone did it. You are utterly clueless.
Yup.
It’s not about correctness. It’s about a culture that you have no hope of understanding.
Well, you just wrote two paragraphs on it containing two enormous fabrications.
Declined? No, ignored. There’s a difference.
It’s both. That’s the culture.
Since you’re an editor, you don’t need to hide. Why not come out?
If you’re such an awesome academic, you can figure it out from my publication record. PubMed is free and has been for decades. You should check it out!
You did and continue to do so.
Which means that you don’t really have any familiarity with scientific culture. Perhaps that was a factor in your lack of academic success.
Or you didn’t notice it, which is much more likely given your track record here. I suggest that you go back to the beginning of this post and note how howlingly insane your accusation of Amerocentrism was.
So you really have no idea who Joe Felsenstein is.
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We come from very different cultures. I was in undergrad almost exactly the same years as you were (based on the date you indicated). No student at my university (or any other university where I had friends attending) would have called a faculty member by his or her first name unless first invited to do so. It would have been considered very bad manners, the equivalent of addressing someone in French as “tu” who should be addressed as “vous”. It was automatically “Dr.” or “Professor” or more rarely “Mr.” (for male professors). And I’m betting that was the case at most American universities and colleges during the 1970s, even if it’s not the case now.
Let’s hear from some others here on this. Those of you out there who were in undergraduate programs from about 1974 through to about 1979, did you, when addressing your professors, usually call them by their first names? And if so, did you do so right from the start, without invitation, or only after they invited or instructed you to do so?
It would be interesting to hear from people from all countries on this, as there may be national differences, and from all parts of the USA on this, as there may be regional differences.
No, there’s your presumptuousness again. Since you did not specify “American scientific culture”, your remark must be taken as general, to apply to scientific culture all over the world. You assume that “scientific culture” is the same all over the world as it is in the corners of American science that you personally know well. But it isn’t, as I just showed regarding the culture of manners in addressing professors. All you’ve shown is that I’m not familiar with the culture of the corners of American science education that you happen to know well. (By the way, how would you know the manners of undergraduate students in all 50 states, unless you had taught in all 50 states? And how would you know the reaction of every New England science professor to students addressing them familiarly, even though you only know a fraction of those professors personally? How do you know there aren’t some New England professors who would find such a form of address presumptuous and rude?)
Since you’re not going to give me a clear exposition regarding undergraduate research, I’ll drop the topic.
I know he posts here occasionally, and is more polite and constructive than many others who do. I know he is an evolutionary theorist. But as you or someone here once told me, evolutionary theory is a huge field, and no one knows all of it. I had the impression he was a population geneticist, and I thought that was different from what you did. Of course, I’m not denying there is overlap. If you say he’s an expert on phylogenetics, I’ll believe you.
No. I even gave you a hypothetical example.
I requested an example of the use of the term “colleague” that suggests it should only be used for professors or grad students or people of similar status when referring to one another.
Clear now?
Well, that’s interesting. I am also not a phylogeneticist, but I do know the answer to the question. And by now so should you. Yet you don’t. One must wonder why.
Very odd. I can’t see why you would say that unless you were not paying much attention to this discussion despite the many, many words you have contributed to it.
He states that most evolutionary biologists claim that there should not be a single gene whose phylogeny diverges from that of species to which it belongs. That is a falsehood, and one which he must know is false.
He hasn’t, a year after he first asserted it in print in regards to Richard Dawkins. In fact, he just repeated it again, in this very lecture. So I fail to see why you would conclude he is willing to correct it.
And just what is preventing you from actually reading some of the material on the subject that has been presented to you in this very discussion? I mean, if you don’t have the time or interest, OK, I guess. But then don’t keep pontificating on this subject regarding which you are willingly ignorant, and make false claims that everyone else here (except Bill Cole) know to be false.
Well, maybe @Eddie will now actually read that one page article, now that it has been recommended by a Christian.
Yeah, just he’s just a bit of one. LOL.
Joseph “Joe” Felsenstein (born May 9, 1942[2]) is a Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Genome Sciences and Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is best known for his work on phylogenetic inference, and is the author of Inferring Phylogenies , and principal author and distributor of the package of phylogenetic inference programs called PHYLIP. Closely related to his work on phylogenetic inference is his introduction of methods for making statistically independent comparisons using phylogenies
Joseph Felsenstein - Wikipedia
So, now that you know, can you recall @Joe_Felsenstein ever indicating that the field of phylogenetics was in big trouble because there were too many individual genes that diverged from the trees to which their species belong? Do you think it likely that Buggs would be more aware of such a problem than Joe?
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Google is your friend:
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/423061
https://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/fulltext/S0169-5347(03)00355-0
His 8 most cited works, totalling over 100,000 citations, are all about phylogenetics:
I don’t think I’d be out of line in suggesting that Joe is literally the most influential living phylogeneticist in the world, arguably with the exception of Masatoshi Nei.
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You could easily look him up. I would describe Joe as a specialist in phylogenetic methods. He introduced several methods now ubiquitous in the field, a number of widely used computer programs, and sundry other important innnovations. Big name in the field. Hey, you may have noticed that he wrote a book on the subject. So thanks for believing me.
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