Jump to content

User:Felsenst

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Joe Felsenstein

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.

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).