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  2. New paper by moi

New paper by moi

By evolvingthoughts on August 12, 2007.

I have a review of the centenary festschrift for Mayr, published by the National Academies of Science, in the latest Biology and Philosophy here. I worked pretty hard on this one, so it's more than your average dashed off review article...

Hey, Jody; Fitch, Walter M.; Ayala, Francisco J., eds. 2005. Systematics and the origin of species: On Ernst Mayr’s 100th Anniversary. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Pages: 367 + xiii. ISBN: 0-309-09536-0

Tags
Biodiversity
evolution
Philosophy of Science
Species and systematics

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On Mayr

Evolgen has a has a nice little post poking fun at the late Ernst Mayr. A few comments.

The Life and Times of Ernst Mayr

There is a good biography of Ernst Mayr in the upcoming issue of Theoretical Population Biology. The author, Eviatar Nevo, provides both a summary of Mayr's work and distills his contributions into categories.

Mayr's Whig: repost

[This is another repost from my old blog. I am sitting at home suffering with a hole in my jaw where a tooth, or its remnants was extracted with extreme prejudice, so I don't feel much like blogging.] The evil that men do lives after them;

Ernst Mayr, R.I.P.

Harvard announced today that Ernst Mayr, the venerable and legendary evolutionary biologist who made his home there for so long, died yesterday at the age of 100.

Hmmm. Closed Access. $32. Can it be gad for free?

Coturnix - will email it to you.

Cheers

Who is Jody and why does she deserve a "Hey" in the author list???

He is a leading geneticist at Rutgers University, and the author of an important book on species concetps.

I'm reading the Hey book right now to prepare for my comps this fall.

Good job John, just took a look at it. What do you mean by the latter half of this quote?

But the project to harness systematics, which is very much the poor cousin of biological disciplines, is a good idea, although we might be a bit less enthusiastic about bioinformatics than we were a few years ago, given the lack of generally useful results.

I agree with the first half, but I am puzzled by the second half. From what I hear on the list-serves and other news, the big push right now is in bioinformatics as related to biogeography, systematics, and biodiversity. In fact, 3 postdocs were just advertised at the Field Museum, all some aspect of bioinformatics. Granted it has been a bit slow to take off, but are their results "generally useless"? Can you point to any specific examples?

As a disclaimer, I am not a bioninformaticist in any way. I'm old fashioned morphology, ecology and some molecular systemacist.

This is the umpteenth time my poor advisor has been taken for a "she", lol :)

Note that I did not say that bioinformatics is "generally useless", but that it lacks "generally useful" results. The one does not imply the other.

Bioinformatics was launched as the new hope of biology - allowing us to deal with large data sets (particularly in molecular biology, such as microarray data) and find useful results in the morass of data. It simply doesn't do that, nor should a sober expectation have thought it would. Biology is massively interconnected and also massively noisy, and there are no simple solutions.

Just as molecular systematics had some success but didn't change the conceptual issues, only the amount of data to be analysed, bioinformatics has had some good results, and a lot of disappointment.