Talk:Evolution of flagella
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I removed the section about the yersinia pestis flagellum. The reference was not from a peer reviewed journal.
Nic's introduction to the article:
Note: The beginning author of this section is new to Wikipedia, and apparently stepped on some toes when he added this material to the flagellum article. The topic of the origin of flagella is indeed something worth having in an encyclopedia, as (1) many people (Intelligent Design fans) claim that no scientific information exists on the topic, and (2) actually there is a lot of such information. Type "flagellum" and "design" into google to see what I mean.
- Could someone please give a web link to even one of the "many people" who claim that "no scientific information exists on the topic"? If there are many, perhaps some of them are well-known - even mentioned in Wikipedia! --Uncle Ed 18:40, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
This article looks for my taste far too much like an anti-Behe or anti-ID position statement. It's more something I would expect on http://www.talkorigins.org. But Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and not a discussion forum so I would expect under the title "Evolution of flagella" a summary and explanation of the current status of scientific research on this subject. Behe, ID or IC don't come into that and simply shouldn't be mentioned at all. If you want to tell us about the discussions surrounding ID et cetera, I would suggest you write it under the title "Intelligent Design and the evolution of flagella" or something, but then it also shouldn't be a position statement but a neutral description of the discussion which describes its origins, history, current standing, arguments et cetera.
Another thing that could be better is the integration of this article with the rest of Wikipedia. Why, for example, are the links to Lynn Margulis and cilium external links? There's also a whole lot of biological terms that are explained elsewhere in Wikipedia and should be linked to. -- Jan Hidders 05:52 Jul 22, 2002 (PDT)
- Nic, I agree with Jan for the most part. This is a great article, but I think that the ID comments should be a foot-note, not the opening. I think that you'll appreciate that science exists for its own reasons, not just to refute ID nonsense. As a scientist, I'm half-insulted that so many persons feel the need to discus scientific theories in the context of anti-scientific ideas.
- Be careful of using the word "I" in an article. These aren't supposed to be personal statements, and they don't belong to any particular person. Use the talk page to discuss your understanding of an issue.
- I also have some issues with the formatting, which I may fix in the near future. Specifically, I think all reference should be at the bottom of the page, after all text...and that is a bit of overkill with external references. Ideally, you could just refer to one page which includes all of those references.
-adam
(P.S. I don't think there's any risk of anyone deleting an entire article, especially one that obviously had so much good research. I'll move some of your personal comments to the talk page)
[edit] references
This may be somewhat redundant of me to state, but I think the references part of the article is perhaps overblown and could use better organization. Here's what I'd suggest:
- Highlight the key references. For example, if I'm interested in Margulis's theory about flagella, what are the 2 or 3 key papers I should read, e.g. a seminal paper, and a recent review paper? IMHO as a Wiki-newbie, it seems reasonable to also give the extensive list of references that the article currently contains (on the "disk space is cheap" theory), but I think the key references should be highlighted, ideally with a brief statement about what's in those key papers.
- Separate the editorializing. I think an annotated bibliography is great. At the same time, much of the references section seems to be a relatively blow-by-blow review of how the various players in this research areas have argued with each other in the literature. I found this difficult to get through, and it could perhaps be summarized by saying that different researchers have different viewpoints, debate each other in the literature, and sometimes don't solidly answer others researchers' charges (which is kind of what you'd expect to see given any controversy). I'd propose one of: (1) separating this part of the article into another one titled something like "Evolution of flagella, debate in literature", and leaving the current article with a more brief list of references, (2) separating it into a different section of the current article with its own heading, (3) dare I say, remove it, or convert it into a simple annotated bibliography that states in a sentence or two what each paper cited is about.
- Organize the editorial content currently in the references. Assuming the reference content stays, I think it needs some organization. Part of it is giving references, part of it seems to be summarizing the call-and-response pattern of debate through the literature, part of it seems to be trying to synthesize the argument that the evolution of flagella is plausible without a notion of intelligent design. These should be separate sections (or articles), and should start with a statement of what the section is doing, e.g. something like "Although debate continues, the scientific community broadly finds it plausible that flagella could evolve through natural selection.", and discuss what Behe and ID friends says, and then what the non-IDers claim.
I admit that I'm unlikely to get around to this myself; I can only offer the excuse that I don't feel very familiar with the area (and my advisor would prefer if I read other things :-). Hope this helps.
-[[user::zashaw|-zashaw]]
Yikes, the references page is a mess. There's an accessible presentation of the Margulis' theory in one of the papers in Microbial Phylogeny and Evolution (2005). -- Danny Yee 12:08, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
I just did a massive trimming job on the article, hopefully making it into something more Wikipedic that can be more easily edited in the future. Here are all of the references I trimmed out, along with some extensive quotes which might be a bit too detailed or a bit too copyrighted to fit nicely into a general encyclopedic article:
Talk:Evolution of flagella/references
[edit] ID stuff
I moved the "creationist controversy" stuff around: Behe rather specifically criticises the cilium (not the eukaryotic flagellum, which I understand is related) and the bacterial flagellum as being irreducibly complex. So it's best to put his criticism as a subsection there. Martin 22:24, 2 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Note cilia is often used to apply to eukaryotic flagella, especially in evolutionary contexts.
[edit] New Article
Mark J. Pallen and Nicholas J. Matzke. "From The Origin of Species to the origin of bacterial flagella." Nature Reviews Microbiology 4, 784-790 (October 2006) | doi:10.1038/nrmicro1493
I'll try to add some information from this article in a little bit.
