Talk:Bacteriophage experimental evolution

Hopefull David Tribe and John Denhenny will jopin forces here. :-) Nancy Sculerati 16:52, 21 June 2007 (CDT)

These Wikipedia imports need to be done from the Wiki source, not the display... James A. Flippin 16:53, 21 June 2007 (CDT)

It's really irrelevant, James- only because what got imported only serves as a rough kind of outline, a placeholder, for what's to come. By the time the article is done, there will very likely be nothing left of the old Wikipedia article. Bacteriophage is an approved articles, and the field is a complicated one, many artices will be worked on a bit at a time- but in concert. It's a creative process that needs to incubate. Yopu are right that we don't want to be a mirror of WP (especially a cracked one) but these imports by John are in good faith made by an expert in the subject. It's ok, really, to let them sit for a while -you will see good articles come from them.[Everybody's very busy now, so it's one step at a time. [User:Nancy Sculerati|Nancy Sculerati]] 16:57, 21 June 2007 (CDT)

It's really relevant, because it makes it very difficult to edit the articles. If you just copy and paste the display, all you get for a footnote is a raised number, not the actual footnote. James A. Flippin 17:01, 21 June 2007 (CDT)

James, how about showing us how to import this article so that the references work correctly. --Matt Innis (Talk) 17:09, 21 June 2007 (CDT)

It's currently impossible for this page, since it no longer even exists at Wikipedia (they seem to not like lists of journal articles). In general though, it is most helpful to go to the page, say Phage ecology, click edit this page, copy the source in the edit box, and paste it into the edit box at Citizendium. If you compare the original import and current revision, you can see the difference clearly. James A. Flippin 17:16, 21 June 2007 (CDT)

Is this right?

"An advantage of laboratory phylogenetics is the exact evolutionary history of an organism is known, rather than estimated as is the case for most organisms."

In the laboratory you have the start genotype and the end genotype and possibly many intermediate genotypes depending on how the experiment is designed. However, unless each genome has only one mutation per generation, there is no way to know the exact sequence of events that led to the new genotype. Pedantic, I know, but we need to be as accurate a possible, as well as enthusiastic. Am I missing something with respect to the details of the experiments here? Chris Day (talk) 15:00, 23 June 2007 (CDT)

well, Chris, while it is theoretically possible to track each mutation change (I think in fact this has been done), that's not exactly what I mean. Rather a lineage is split artificially and allowed to propagate in isolation and subsequently we use our knowledge of the population's evolutionary history to test the ability of phylogenetic models to estimate unknown histories. The Hillis, Bull, White et al. paper is a good example of this. I think all that is required for this statement is that we know the start point and the end point, hence can trace the phylogeny in between.