P&LS Darksiders Lab Project (Part 1 of 3)

It seems like every philosopher of biology wants a lab group. This year, I finally got one: four first-rate graduate students interested and competent in biological sciences, whether it's evolution, ecology, or neuroscience. The group is Frank Cartieri (first year PhD, biology), Lindsay Craig (on the market PhD, biology), Vanessa Gorley (third year PhD, neuroscience), and Clement Loo (fourth year PhD, ecology and environmental philosophy) And then there's me. Why "Darksiders?" We eschew philosophy for science. Apparently, that's going to the dark side. (And if that's so, then color me dark!)

At any rate, we've got a project ready to write up, and we've got a seminar scheduled in the UC Biological Sciences Department on 2 November. Let's hope this flag flies. So what's the project?

I've long wanted to know what impact the debate between Coyne and Wade over Wright's Shifting Balance Theory (in 1997-1998) was influential, if at all. (My thing is Fisher and Wright, you know. Just browse this blog.) Mike Dietrich inspired me to apply some citation analysis tools --very cool ones at that-- to the question and answer it empirically. So, I got Frank, Lindsay, Vanessa, and Clement involved and that's what we did.

Starting in 1929, Fisher and Wright, and then Coyne and Wade in 1997, focused on nine key issues: Fisher's fundamental theorem, Wright's adaptive landscape metaphor, Wright's shifting balance process, the importance of epistasis in evolution, population structure, speciation, evolution of dominance, evolution in Panaxia dominula, and evolution in Cepaea nemoralis.

Keeping these nine issues in the air, we asked four specific questions about the fallout from 1997-1998 up to now.

1. What are the persistent issues?
   
2. What are the "dead" issues?
   
3. What original problems were overlooked?
   
4. What are the most fruitful future directions?
   

Here's how we went about answering these questions:

• We collected citations from Web of Science and manually scored and counted articles cited by CBT 1997 and WG 1998 to 2009 for centrality among nine debates in the Fisher-Wright controversy and summarized the results. (Ask I'll tell you the scoring procedure.)
• We used Web of Science and Citespace II algorithms to examine co-citations in network clusters and across time identifying "turning point" articles and common "burst phrases" to localize influence of CBT 1997 and WG 1998 to 2009.
• We used Wade and Goodnight 1991 as a control to determine that CBT 1997 and WG 1998 are influencers by running citation and co-citations algorithms on WG 1991 for 1991-97 and 1997-2009 identifying "turning point" articles and common "burst phrases."
• We used Web of Science algorithms to detect biological subject area influence of CBT 1997 and WG 1998 to 2009.
  

My own view is that we learned quite a lot from doing all this --we had 283 papers to work through using the methods I just listed. In a near future post, I'll discuss the data. After that, I'll discuss what we learned --really, the best part.

References:

Coyne, J. A., N. H. Barton, and M. Turelli (1997), “Perspective: A Critique of Sewall Wright’s Shifting Balance Theory of Evolution”, Evolution 51: 643-671.

Wade, M. and C. Goodnight (1991), "Sewall Wright's Shifting Balance Theory: An Experimental Test", Science 253: 1015-1018.

Wade, M. J. and C. J. Goodnight (1998), “Perspective: The Theories of Fisher and Wright in the Context of Metapopulations: When Nature Does Many Small Experiments”, Evolution 52: 1537-1548.

Comments

[John Hawks]

This is a very cool project; I'll look forward to seeing what you found!

[Robert Skipper]

Thanks, John. Results coming soon!

[Term papers]

Awesome project really looking forward to know the results..!