Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Natural selection/archive2

The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was not promoted 16:08, 30 July 2007.

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Natural selection

previous FAC

The previous nomination seems to have failed due to having no-one to deal with complaints, however, I'm willing to do what's needed, and evolution has calmed down a lot since it returned to FA, so I'm going to nominate this excellent article, and do what I can. Adam Cuerden ^talk 23:00, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

• Comments It's good to see this here. I did some work on this article around the end of March and was planning to bring it to FAC eventually, but got derailed by meatspace ;) Two things I remember from my mental to-do list:
  • Reorganize the last paragraph of 'types of selection'. It's basically just a list of definitions, and I don't think the terms all have (or need) their own articles, but this is a case where tedious, mushy prose is trying to do the work of a nice bulleted list.
  • I never liked the 'impact of the idea' section, from the title on down. I intended to rewrite it, but I no longer have any of the relevant source material, which tends to be the work of historians and thus is primarily in dead-tree form. In particular, the mention of influence specifically on 19th-century thought seems to imply by omission that there was relatively little influence on 20th-century thought. The first paragraph in general needs to be rewritten, I think. I'm also not sure how notable the Lotka stuff is; I may just be clueless but I'd never heard of him before I started working on this article. Opabinia regalis 04:34, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

• Oppose—1a and subprofessional formatting. Could be fixed, so bring in someone else to copy-edit the whole thing.
  • The use of the term "favorable" in the opening paragraph is problematic.
  • Why is "1859" linked? I can't find a single thing that's relevant in that article.
  • "adaptations that specialize organisms for particular ecological niches"—Isn't "specialise" intransitive only?
  • Captions need to be brief (MOS).
  • Ugly combinations of italics and roman quote marks.
  • "less-fit genotype"—Hyphen necessary? "more-fit" --> "fitter"?
  • "Very low-fitness genotypes"—The hyphen is awkward in this triple epithet. Try "genotypes of very low fitness". Tony 15:51, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

Will work on it! Adam Cuerden ^talk 10:10, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

• Support Looks great; it's one of my favorite subjects. I think it would be better with the antibiotic resistance diagram up top instead of the finches which I like for the historical aspect, but frankly their picture doesn't convey any information to the average novice who won't know why and how the beaks are different. The antibiotic resistance diagram seems to capture the essence of natural selection far better. BenB4 13:32, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
  • That seems to be one of those discussions that will go back and forth forever - the antibiotic resistance image was originally at the top, and then some people came and complained. Spamsara 11:32, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

• Support as is of course, since I nominated it last time. Samsara 11:32, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
• Oppose for now. Prose needs a lot of work, with an eye toward making it accessible to readers without a background in biology. (I find it confusing and hard to read, and I have a degree in biology, with an eco/evo focus, from a top university... This shouldn't be the case.) Also finding some small errors of fact or statements that sound like errors of fact, such as implying that Mendelian evolution only holds for single-gene traits (it works for multi-gene traits too, with some possible adjustments for gene linkage etc.) and saying the fitness of an allele is zero just because one particular individual with that allele dies. I'm going through the article bit by bit and trying to make improvements. Calliopejen1 10:14, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

• If you could make a picture that shows the food typically eaten by that species next to the head and beak, that would probably solve your problem. I remember seeing such an image in some textbook(s). Here is another variation on that theme: [1] 82.71.48.158 19:42, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

• Oppose, the article has been at FAC for almost a month, yet still needs cleanup of basic [WP:MOS]] items. There is someWP:MSH repetition. Incorrect use of WP:DASHes and hyphens. Far too much uncited text, particularly for a science topic. Incomplete ref formatting (example: MRSA Superbug News. Retrieved on May 6, 2006. ) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:33, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.