Talk:James F. Crow

Full list of students and postdocs
The full list of his students and postdocs is given on his homepage as:

* Seymour Abrahamson * Kenichi Aoki * Bruce Baker * Jack Bennett * James Bull * Yong Jai Chung * Loring Craymer * Carter Denniston * William Engels * Joe Felsenstein * Lawrence Friedman * Ove Frydenberg * Sasha Gimelfarb * Rayla Greenberg Temin * Thomas Gregg * Dan Hartl * Yuichiro Hiraizumi * Branch Howe * Wen Hsiung Li   * Elaine Johansen Mange * Warwick Kerr * Motoo Kimura * Alexey Kondrashov * Russell Lande * Chuck Langley * Cathy Laurie * William R. Lee * Terry Lyttle * Russell Malmberg * Arthur Mange * Etan Markowitz * Takeo Maruyama * Muneo Matsuda * Joyce Mitchell * Michael Moody * Newton E. Morton * Terumi Mukai * Thomas Nagylaki * Taisei Nomura * Ohmi Ohnishi * Paulo Otto * Janardan Pandey * Patrick Phillips * Michael Rose * Larry Sandler * Edward L. Schwartz * Frank Seto * Michael Simmons * Samuel Skinner * Robert Tamarin * W. Y. Tan * Chung I Wu

User:Samsara (talk • contribs) 12:42, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

Walter Nance
In addition to the fact that Nance is not on Crow's own list of past graduates (replicated above), his own website does not state he has worked with Crow. More seriously, I had never heard of Nance before, and whereas all the other listed are highly cited paper and textbook authors, Nance's achievements as per his website bio sound less stellar (his work on deafness could be described as "just one of those traits"). I feel his being notable would be a necessary prerequisite to his inclusion. At this point, shortening the list seems preferable to lengthening it. So if you wish to contest the inclusion of any given person, please go ahead; we can discuss it here. - User:Samsara (talk • contribs) 13:24, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Students and postdocs
Walter Nance has worked with Jim but may not have been either student or a postdoc. Neither was I: I was an undergraduate hanging out in Jim's lab 1961-1964 and he supervised my undergraduate honors thesis. The list at Jim's website is just wrong about that (I was Dick Lewontin's student and Alan Robertson's postdoc). Maybe say instead of "graduate students and postdocs" the phrase "undergraduate and graduate students and postdocs". Felsenst 03:13, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

What he did
In addition to teaching at Dartmouth in the 1940s didn't he do a few other things of note? I seem to recall work on genetic loads, evolution of recombination, the neutral theory, and a lot of Drosophila experimentation ... ;-)  Felsenst 03:13, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Must do
This article needs to be supported with references to reliable sources, and by an appreciation of the subject's professional work in, for instance, population genetics. Macdonald-ross (talk) 07:55, 29 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Crow is a major figure in population genetics and important in the history of the field. He easily deserves a Wikipedia page.  But the problem with this one is that it gets up to the 1940s and then stops.  The original author just gave up.  As Crow is still alive, there are 60 years left to go.  All the important stuff is not yet covered.  Alas, I don't have time to work on this one. Felsenst (talk) 15:38, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

Added a reference to Crow's writings.
And correspondingly removed the references needed tag from the article. The article is now on my watchlist. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk) 16:39, 28 June 2010 (UTC)

Important papers
I'm glad someone is now adding publications and some summary of his achievements. His most important ones are his book with Kimura (1970), his paper with Kimura in 1964 in Genetics which contains the formula for the level of heterozygosity maintained by neutral mutation, their 1965 paper on the evolution of sex (evolution of recombination), the Morton, Crow, and Muller (1954) paper on the load ratio, and some others on genetic loads. There are many others too. For a list consult my Bibliography of Theoretical Population Genetics, which you can access free at my site (just type its name into a search engine). The point is that the most important papers are decades ago. Felsenst (talk) 06:16, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

Neutrality
A lot of this article verges on the hagiographic, with an awful lot of emotional language praising the subject. While Crow was certainly an important individual, NPoV must be maintained. Michaelmas1957 (talk) 10:37, 8 January 2012 (UTC)


 * I think a lot of it was copied from the page on him at his department, which is written in a paying-tribute mode. The people who copied it should have edited that tone.  Felsenst (talk) 20:29, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

Content Needed
The "Race and IQ controversy" section does not convey the nature of the controversy nor the role of race and/or IQ in that controversy. 50.9.53.111 (talk) 13:27, 20 April 2012 (UTC)