I have a review of the centenary festschrift for Mayr, published by the National Academies of Science, in the latest Biology and Philosophy here. I worked pretty hard on this one, so it's more than your average dashed off review article...
Hey, Jody; Fitch, Walter M.; Ayala, Francisco J., eds. 2005. Systematics and the origin of species: On Ernst Mayr’s 100th Anniversary. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Pages: 367 + xiii. ISBN: 0-309-09536-0
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Here is a working list of species concepts presently in play. I quote "Concepts" above because, for philosophical reasons, I think there is only one concept - "species", and all the rest are conceptions, or definitions, of that concept. I have christened this the Synapormorphic Concept of Species…
tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that…
Harvard announced today that Ernst Mayr, the venerable and legendary evolutionary biologist who made his home there for so long, died yesterday at the age of 100. Science magazine published a retrospective, written by Mayr himself, on his 80 years as a scientist last July after his 100th birthday…
In honour of Linnaeus' 300th birthday, and to rescue him from the canard that he merely applied Aristotelian logic to biology, I offer up this essay on his view of classification and species. I do not think Linnaeus was an essentialist in the Mayrian sense - he nowhere specifies that species have…
Hmmm. Closed Access. $32. Can it be gad for free?
Coturnix - will email it to you.
Cheers
Got it. Thanks.
Congrats! I look forward to reading it...SH
Who is Jody and why does she deserve a "Hey" in the author list???
He is a leading geneticist at Rutgers University, and the author of an important book on species concetps.
I'm reading the Hey book right now to prepare for my comps this fall.
Good job John, just took a look at it. What do you mean by the latter half of this quote?
I agree with the first half, but I am puzzled by the second half. From what I hear on the list-serves and other news, the big push right now is in bioinformatics as related to biogeography, systematics, and biodiversity. In fact, 3 postdocs were just advertised at the Field Museum, all some aspect of bioinformatics. Granted it has been a bit slow to take off, but are their results "generally useless"? Can you point to any specific examples?
As a disclaimer, I am not a bioninformaticist in any way. I'm old fashioned morphology, ecology and some molecular systemacist.
This is the umpteenth time my poor advisor has been taken for a "she", lol :)
Note that I did not say that bioinformatics is "generally useless", but that it lacks "generally useful" results. The one does not imply the other.
Bioinformatics was launched as the new hope of biology - allowing us to deal with large data sets (particularly in molecular biology, such as microarray data) and find useful results in the morass of data. It simply doesn't do that, nor should a sober expectation have thought it would. Biology is massively interconnected and also massively noisy, and there are no simple solutions.
Just as molecular systematics had some success but didn't change the conceptual issues, only the amount of data to be analysed, bioinformatics has had some good results, and a lot of disappointment.