User:Felsenst

Felsenst is me, Joe Felsenstein. I am Professor Emeritus of Genome Sciences and of Biology at the University of Washington, Seattle. I have contributed to the following pages, among others: Before I figured out how to register here (duhh!) I made contributions as 24.18.173.243 and 128.95.144.41. (The nonbiological contributions from the former number are not by me but by my son). Occasionally I forget to log in when submitting a change and then I will be listed as 128.208.27.183.
 * Sewall Wright (material on his work in population genetics)
 * JBS Haldane (ditto)
 * R. A. Fisher (ditto but it needs a lot more work)
 * John Maynard Smith
 * Naomi Mitchison (correcting reference to her brother JBS Haldane)
 * A Mathematical Theory of Natural and Artificial Selection (Haldane's great series of papers -- corrected description)
 * Walter M. Fitch (his work on phylogenies)
 * linkage disequilibrium (its invention by Robbins in 1918 and its naming)
 * Richard Lewontin (his work in theoretical and experimental population genetics)
 * Luca Cavalli-Sforza (his work with Anthony Edwards on phylogenetic methods)
 * My own page (yes, I did edit it once, but that was just to correct my departmental affiliations).
 * genetic algorithms (their prehistory in population genetics before "the father of genetic algorithms", John Holland, including the work of Nils Aall Barricelli and Alex Fraser)
 * phylogenetics (clarifying description of methods)
 * Lewontin's Fallacy (on-the-one-hand-this-on-the-other-hand-that)
 * Bernetta A. Miller (my grandmother's cousin, pioneer aviator with colorful life)
 * Friends University (added Jim Crow to list of famous alumni)
 * Margaret Dayhoff (described her phylogeny and database work and PAM matrix).
 * Assen Jordanoff (corrected English in page on an author whose book on flying I read as a child).
 * Charles Goodnight links back and forth to Utah Phillips song and mention of it in Goodnight page.
 * Amphioxus to give the correct authorship of the Amphioxus Song. (Since removed from the page by someone else).
 * Nils Aall Barricelli to mention his work at the University of Washington and his work in Princeton being unpaid. BTW I met him in 1967.
 * Talk:Australopithecus_africanus Bugging them about giving two conflicting stories of how Raymond Dart came to discover this important species.
 * Weldon Memorial Prize Is it outrageously self-interested to establish this page? The Prize people have been lazy about making any page for it.
 * Brownian tree is not a phylogeny but kind of cute, but they defined it inadequately so I complained on the Discussion page.
 * Polya urn model to add a mention of the Moran model as a modification of that urn model which models genetic drift.
 * Cedric Smith to give him credit for his early and fairly general discovery of the EM algorithm.

Some day I would like to straighten out the complete mess surrounding the word "cladistics" but for the present I am just trying to figure out what are some of the definitions of it that people use. See the Talk page Talk:Cladistics for more comments on that.

I have also disputed with people whether J.B.S. Haldane can fairly be described as "Scottish". Actually I love Scotland, lived two years of my life there, and even have an honorary degree from the University of Edinburgh. That doesn't make me Scottish, though. But once Scottish Pride kicks in you can't stop all sorts of people from being labelled that way. Maybe even "Scotty" on Star Trek ...   A similar issue arises with Haldane and India. He spent the last 8 years of his life there, and few of his major papers were written there. Nevertheless some Indians seem to insist on his being labeled "Indian". I would say it might be fair to say "British, later Indian" but no, that's not good enough for Indian Pride. So as of now, he is described in the first line of his Wikipedia page as "a British-born Indian scientist". See, he was born in Britain, hung around there for only 64 years, writing a mere 100 scientific papers. But then he went to India for 8 years, so obviously he gets called "British-born Indian"! Let's look up Albert Einstein. He spent 22 years in the U.S. He was born in Germany, spent some of his most important and active years in Switzerland. He gets described as "German-born" but is not described as a "German-born American physicist".

I'm beginning to realize that getting things straight in the Wikipedia may be important to having a sound dominant-consensus view in a field. (However, it is a dominant-consensus view and there is no real way around that).