User:Fishratthings/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Deep homology

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I am strongly interested in macroevolution, and the concept of deep homology is definitely a part of this. It is also heavily tied to developmental biology as it describes highly conserved developmental processes.

Summary
This article seems to be a decent overview of the concept of deep homology and has a good range of credible secondary sources cited. Despite this, it seems a bit too short and underdeveloped, and sometimes the wording is awkward or confusing.

Lead Section
The lead sections concisely summarizes this topic in a neutral tone. It could use some rewording and/or "fleshing out," though, as it was difficult to understand at first.

Content
The "History" section gives a good overview of the history behind this concept's development. However, I have some issues:


 * The order of events is awkward and not linked together well.
 * There is a strong statement regarding Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire's contributions to deep homology in his crayfish investigations. The author(s) of this article states that other scientists of Geoffroy's time were skeptical and then said that he was later "shown to be correct."
 * The quote from Geoffroy is cited from one of the modern secondary sources' translation and not from their original work. It also does not indicate that this is a translation.

The "A different kind of homology" section is awkward. From the description, it seems that it would further elaborate on what deep homology is. It does do so at the very start of the section, but it then just lists some specific examples of homologous development. It might be better to split the first part from the examples and put the examples in a relevant section (e.g., labelled "Examples"). Despite this, the given examples were relevant and interesting, especially the last one telling about a possible deep homology link in the development of acoustic communication.

The "Algorithm" section seems random and out of place. It is somewhat related to deep homology, but it seems like it belongs in another article such as one of the main evo-devo articles.

This article is a bit biased towards animal development - for a lack of better words. Deep homology is also relevant to other groups of multicellular organisms, such as plants and fungi, but the tone and content of the article might mislead readers to think that it is animal-exclusive.

Recent Activity
There has not been a human edit on this article since 2020 and no major changes since about 2018. The most recent edits have been by bots making minor changes. Also, there is not much in the Talk section. In short, there has not been significant development on this article for several years. This lack of activity might partially explain why the article appears underdeveloped.