Talk:Neoteny in humans

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 15 January 2019 and 25 April 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): GGarcia2019, Ahorvath16. Peer reviewers: Osaobento, TheRealBenSherman.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 01:32, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Criteria for listing papers in an article
An IP editor has repeatedly added a citation to a work which is however not used in the text of this article. Wikipedia's job is not to make a list of every journal article, conference paper or even book related to a topic, but to summarize and explain the topic concisely, using a selection of the most useful works, i.e. those that review thinking on the topic. Many primary sources will necessarily remain unused in even the most thorough article. Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:02, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

Usage of kemonomimi character
Are we sure we sure that we should use an (arguably) non-human character here? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.234.207.224 (talk) 01:33, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

I agree that the article is odd in its lack of actual human representation, opting instead for cartoons. Profesor Josué (talk) 16:10, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

Explanation for citation edits
Before my edits, there was no consistent citation style in this article (authors with first full names or initial with or without periods, and first name before or after last author). After my edits there is now a completely consistent author citation style. In addition, I have templated and added a lot of missing data to the citations, and in particular, the following (before→ after): Finally, several repeated citations have been combined. Boghog (talk) 19:23, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
 * cite web 1 → 6
 * cite book 3 → 38
 * isbn 13 → 30
 * publisher 2 → 35
 * cite journal 23 → 28
 * pmid 6 → 9
 * I appreciate your efforts to clean up the refs in this article, but I disagree with the idea that using first initials only (instead of full first names) throughout is a good idea. I think more-specific info is better than less in cites (within reason, of course). If some cites lack full first names and that cannot be helped, then so be it; but when we know the first name, I think we should use it (and we should use first and last instead of vauthors when there's just one author). - dcljr (talk) 05:19, 20 July 2019 (UTC)
 * The advantage of vauthors is that it enforces a completely consistent author format style with error checking that avoids the first1, last1, first2, last2, ... clutter in the raw wiki text without loss of data granularity (the author list is comma delimited and parsed by the template to produce clean meta data). In contrast, first will accept anything (full first names, initials with or without periods and with or without spaces between first and middle names). Furthermore vauthors will throw an error if nonsense is entered (e.g., **&*(&(&# MF "Vancouver style error: non-Latin character") whereas first, last parameters will accept complete jibberish (e.g., **&*(&(&# or *(&(#$*&(*&@) without complaint.Boghog (talk) 07:12, 20 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Hmm. You might not "lose" granularity (whatever), but you certainly lose information: the full names of some of the authors. (!) To me, this is an unacceptable trade-off and is comparable to switching citation styles (a la WP:CITEVAR). In particular, seeing as how your change "enforces" (as you say) one particular style that was not used at all in the article before the change (AFAICT), this would seem to run counter to that guideline. (I know you were making the citations consistent, but it's hard to see how this justifies using a novel style that drops information that was already in the existing cite template calls.) And the fact that you are [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?limit=100&title=Special%3AContributions&contribs=user&target=Boghog&namespace=0&tagfilter=&start=&end=2019-07-19 doing this to article after article] is very concerning. As for metadata, if there is some issue that exists when the templates are correctly used, then this is something to take up at Help talk:Citation Style 1 (at which I notice you have already [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?limit=100&title=Special%3AContributions&contribs=user&target=Boghog&namespace=13&tagfilter=&start=&end=2019-07-19 spent a significant amount of time]). But your stated concerns here seem to be largely about what happens when the templates are incorrectly used, in which case I say: if there are actual errors in the template calls, then just fix those errors. &lt;time passes&gt; I see that this has been [//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=vauthors&prefix=Help+talk%3ACitation+Style+1%2F&fulltext=Search+archives&fulltext=Search&ns0=1&searchToken=5aukgvp1zvrumpz0ypnfhjx1v discussed ad nauseum] in the past, but I see no evidence of a consensus forming that using vauthors is a particularly good idea (especially when it leads to removal of information). In fact, I see a lot of comments raising the exact issues I have raised here with no apparent agreement by the end of the discussion that those issues are not legitimate concerns (the conversations tend to just peter out after a while with no real resolution). Frankly—and I'm not trying to be mean in saying this—it seems to me that you have put a lot of time and effort into arguing why vauthors is a great hammer, so you want to use it on as many nails (articles) as you can. Again, I suggest that this seems to run counter to WP:CITEVAR: "Where Wikipedia does not mandate a specific style, editors should not attempt to convert Wikipedia to their own preferred style". It really kinda seems like you're trying to do that. So, now I have to ask: If I went through and converted everything (in this article) to use first and last, what would you do? - dcljr (talk) 17:19, 20 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Before my first edit in this article, 19 out of 51 citations included first full names and the rest did not. Converting all the citations to first name initials which was the predominate style before my first edit is consistent with WP:CITEVAR. Boghog (talk) 19:59, 20 July 2019 (UTC)
 * The ad nauseum discussion is found here. The article after article edits are consistent with WP:CITEVAR (reformatting citations produced by WP:Citoid that are completely oblivious to WP:CITEVAR). Boghog (talk) 20:43, 20 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Finally the Vancouver system author format is not novel. It is used by PubMed and by hundreds of scientific journals. Boghog (talk) 05:22, 21 July 2019 (UTC)
 * You didn't answer my question (final sentence of my last comment). - dcljr (talk) 02:59, 31 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Please note that the majority of the citations before my first edit (45 out of 72) were not even templated. So for the majority of citation in this article, I didn't change first/last to vauthors, but instead added vauthors. Please also note that CITEVAR states imposing one style on an article with inconsistent citation styles is generally considered helpful.  The predominate style before my first edit was to use first author initials, hence my edits were consistent with CITEVAR. If you had gone through the entire article and replaced first author initials with first full names, that would not have been consistent with CITEVAR and I would have a basis to contest your edits. Boghog (talk) 22:37, 2 August 2019 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion: You can see the reason for deletion at the file description page linked above. —Community Tech bot (talk) 19:55, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Skeleton and restoration model of Neanderthal La Ferrassie 1.jpg

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion: Participate in the deletion discussion at the. —Community Tech bot (talk) 22:16, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Skeleton and restoration model of Neanderthal La Ferrassie 1.jpg

Genetic diversity, relaxed sexual selection and immunity
This entire section should probably be deleted. It is poorly sourced and frequently uses terms such as "it has been said" and "it has been cited" without elaborating whom is making such claims. Most of the text is incomprehensible and hard to read. It uses terms like "Neanderthal Desert" and "synaptic plasticity" which are unelaborated and probably irrelevant to neoteny. This makes the section difficult to understand without prior knowledge in evolutionary psychology. One paragraph discusses the evolution of complex language which is entirely irrelevant to neoteny. It concludes that complex language evolution was not the most recent step in evolution because storytelling will not be helpful during droughts which is completely nonsensical. Also, I think that this section is given undue weight since it is one of the largest sections in the article, yet is largely irrelevant to the core topic of neoteny. Like I said at the start, this should probably be deleted, but I wanted to get another person to validate my decision. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.60.109.183 (talk) 20:49, 3 June 2022 (UTC)


 * I prefer to keep the parts with sources, for the rest, I agree, but make it quick Hastengeims (talk) 20:03, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

Introductory sentence is awkward
Explaining my edit: I don't know if there is some policy that requires that an article's title be repeated verbatim in its first sentence, but in this case it makes the sentence awkward. Casu Marzu (talk) 12:55, 21 April 2024 (UTC)