For some reason I am finding it harder to get published as I go on, not easier. I suspect I am getting dumber as I age. However, I just had a paper published in Biology and Philosophy:
Wilkins, John S. 2007. The dimensions, modes and definitions of species and speciation. Biology and Philosophy 22 (2):247 - 266.
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Via Stephen Soldz
Asks Nachiket Vartak:
Deborah Blum at Speakeasy Science has put up a terrific two-part post about the early history of leaded gasoline, which bears much of the blame for lead poisoning in workers and the general population.
"Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune." -Noam Chomsky
Congrats, John!
Do you have a PDF you can e-mail to people?
Not yet. I am not at work, and so can't access it.
When you do get access to it I'd really like to read it, if you could send a pdf this way!
Congratulations!
Perhaps you need to start your own journal now, though, something like the Journal of Speciation.
Good job!
Ian - if he does, I want to be on the editorial board. Just so I can start a big argument, and then use that as an excuse to go off and found my rival journal.
Our library didn't give us access yesterday, but now they do, hurrah! So, I can now authoritatively state that it's a nice paper, and one that would be good to give to graduate students. It might even make them think.
There are a couple of typos, this is the one that stopped me for a moment:
One thought (one more important than nits): if Gavrilets is correct about the shape of fitness landscapes, how can we distinguish bacterial species? You accept that quasi-species exist, but you invoke a different fitness landscape for them, without comment. Gavrilets' solution is to imply that a lineage hasn't had time to drift along the ridges to reach other lineages (p415 of Fitness Landscapes), but he just asserts this, without any deeper consideration. I'm sceptical, until I see a demonstration that this works (bacteria will have had plenty of time to explore a fitness landscape if it hasn't changed in time, so the story presumably involves changing landscapes and extinctions. All of a sudden, it's looking more complicated. Damn).
Oh, and you also state that your book is "forthcoming". Does this mean you've finally found a publisher?
Bob