waynemaddison.bsky.social
Raw pu-erh in the morning; oolong in the afternoon. Chocolate: dark milk. Would rather be drawing spider genitalia, usually. Looking forward to the next field trip. Thinking about getting a pottery wheel. Father of two amazing adults. Emeritus Prof @ UBC
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What does their work mean to them? I wonder why I haven't seen more rehumanizing in the media. It may be that I'm not living there, or that I'm not paying attention, but I worry that humans have some deep instinct to avert our eyes from those cast out, however unjustly.
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Musk's actions here are straight from Russ Vought's playbook.
Who is Russ Vought? A leading Trump advisor. Propublica has the story: www.propublica.org/article/vide...
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Although, I shouldn't contemplate the second law of thermodynamics so much. In the short term, you can do a lot of good. 🙏
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I really wish there were a ring to destroy, or a single brilliant source of power to combat. Instead, it's just opportunistic liars taking advantage of fearful humans' susceptibility. Other liars would take their place. Best wishes on your foray to the gates of Mordor, but I fear we're Fusked.
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We're marching against Mordor on Monday.
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Ethanol is a subcategory of alcohol, so your brain was doing well! It's so standard in the field that we often just say "alcohol", meaning "ethanol".
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Ethanol 70-80% is the standard for long term preservation. We're still using specimens that are 140 years old. (For them, the bigger danger has been light exposure.) 95% ethanol is better for DNA, but worse for the body structures, as they become brittle. Ethanol is much better than isopropanol.
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Beginning scientists don't always distinguish these two. Perfectionism and "completism" need to be targeted: even if you're far from the summit of understanding, as long as you've made good progress upward, you can and should reach the summit of a well and completely expressed paper.
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We’re planning a push on gene tree - species tree features for 4.1!
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@bembidion.bsky.social www.mesquiteproject.org
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The Museo Amparo in Puebla, México, has a room that intermixes recent sculptures amongst pre-European-contact sculptures. This treats the old sculptures not just as products of cultures, but also as products of individual artists.
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One thing I wonder: How much distinction is made between the curved red line on a pot as distinguishing a culture, versus as the invention of a singular artist? Surely individuals mattered. Paying attention to diversity within a culture would be analogous to paying attention to ILS in biology.
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Our paper's main argument is that biologists, in practice, give species a burden (to mean something). We have to admit that burden in our species concept, so that we can hold our empirical methods to account. Our inferences of units must be able to justify the meaning we intend for those units.
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I will look at the paper! A lack of debate would be OK if the cultural units were not asked to carry much meaning, but my bet is that, in the imagination, a shape of pottery soon morphs into a society with diets and customs, just as a yellow eye ring morphs into a lineage with ecology.
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Is there much philosophical/methodological discussion of units in archeology? Is it accepted or controversial that past cohesive processes are important?
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Sigh, yes, we are already well into the dystopic timeline.
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:(
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Yup, things don't last.
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If we seek a history/mechanism balance, why do we spend so much time talking about history? Of 4 constituencies, BSCers, coalesc.-phylogeog., phylogeneticists, & taxonomists we expected strong resistance only from the BSCers, and so focused our strongest arguments there.
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About 5, good, but please realize we are not claiming a universal definition. It's that for *most purposes of most biologists* — and this may not include microevolutionary biologists — a retrospective view is critical. About 6, yes, how deep to look back is not fully discussed in the paper.
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About 4, the chair is simply an object. With that metaphor we were in philosophy mode, not biology mode.
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About 3, our concept is precisely history plus mechanism. It's the BSC that's rejected half. I can imagine a BSCer might think that we're preferring history just because we insist on it. But, we're also insisting on mechanism.
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It took us 7 years to develop, so yes, it's a lot to expect a reader to absorb in one go! We could have turned it into a series of papers, but we just wanted it out.
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I found this while reading a NEXUS file written by another program. Now we are faced with a choice for Mesquite's NEXUS reading: Do we build a difficult workaround (especially annoying to balance paired " separately from ')? But if we did, that would break good files that used " properly.
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But your point was about what biologists think, not what they *should* think. Sadly, I think most seem to be satisfied to be confused, whether or not they realize they are.
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This was in reference to our 2023 paper on species concepts. We argue that what many evolutionary biologists think of as The Concept (the BSC) is inaptly framed in time, and what taxonomists think of as The Concept (de Queiroz's) is ambiguously framed. bsky.app/profile/wayn...
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A parallel thread about species, with my attempt to be provocative. bsky.app/profile/wayn...
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😈 Our Canadian politeness wasn't effective. Time to cause a ruckus!
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I think you might be right about the feather ruffling. Perhaps it seems so sensible, and in many ways so familiar, that biologists don't realize they haven't read it before. My recent reply here shows I'm now into feather ruffling!
bsky.app/profile/wayn...
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Apologies; I tried here to be provocative, and thus unfair to many thoughtful members of each discipline. Way too broad a brush, and far more confident than we felt during 7 years of thought. This deserves a less rude response — maybe a blog post.
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We felt we needed to untangle the conceptual morass, so that "species" could be used with more thoughtfulness, clarity, and consistency.
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4-teachers waffled, though a clear path is available. However, evolutionary biology has already been progressing (via coalescence) toward a good and apt target for taxonomy, but without it being explicit and analyzed as such.
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Oh, excellent questions. We were too polite. Rude volleys: 1-speciation biology felt it owned "species", but its concept didn't serve broadly; 2-taxonomy's methods were unguided by the concepts it cited; 3-philosophy largely addressed the wrong questions, not those pertinent to most biology;
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If you want to jump to the section that addresses this in most depth in more philosophical terms, see 4.5, "The Once and Future Species".
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Yes and no. Hull's, Simpson's, Wiley's, de Queiroz's concepts are similar to each other, and might appear like ours. But ours has a key difference. Theirs span or are ambiguous about time frames. Ours places species in an explicit time frame, which we contend is critical. Here is a snippet.
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If we can't get in tune about what this distinction means, then I don't think we'll get anywhere about any choices based on this distinction.
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Regarding precision, "operational" is not the word I used, as I've emphasized. It's "operationalist". I am NOT saying that species concepts should be non-operational. I am saying that species concepts cannot be EXCLUSIVELY operationalist; they need to include process/theory as well.