Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biology

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Epigenetics

• Epigenetics - main article
  • Epigenetic theory - overlapping content
  • Transgenerational epigenetics - overlapping content
  • Soft inheritance - overlapping content
    • Inheritance of acquired characteristics - negatively characterized as outdated and disproven Soviet dogma that had disastrous administrative consequences
    • Lamarckism - categorized as an obsolete scientific theory, despite contemporary re-analyses within the mainstream scientific community
    • Lysenkoism - depicts Lamarckism, and, specifically, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, as being a textbook example of pseudoscience among Lysenko's many bedlamitic absurdities

This interrelated series of articles is one of the most disoriented, contradictory and factually compromised sets that I've encountered on our project in quite some time. Moreover, the overlapping nature of content and lack of adequately unambiguous central navigation is confusing, even for someone who has existing familiarity with the general topic. I'm not certain of how much available manpower WikiProject Biology has to offer at the moment, but I'd like to get the ball rolling on a collaborative effort of some sort.   — C M B J   04:56, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

Wikimedia Discord has a Biology Channel!

It has recently come to my attention that not only is there a highly active Wikimedia Discord Server, it also has a #wpbiology channel! See Wikipedia:Discord for more details.

I hope to feature a link to this on the main page after the redesign is complete, but for the time being I wanted to advertise it here. I would love for more people to join, and I hope it will prove a major resource to us going forward as we improve WP:BIOL and it's subprojects. I cannot emphasize how refreshing it can be to talk in real time (or even in voice channels!) rather than in talk pages.

@Evolution and evolvability and Alexmar983: This also should serve us nicely for the user group discussions--they have a #meta channel as well.

Draft:MRNA therapeutics

Should this draft be accepted as a stand-alone article? Robert McClenon (talk) 01:21, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

Probably not sadly. It's an ok draft, but would more logically be merged into RNA therapeutics#mRNA (from where 70% was copied over). The Heart Diseases application section and the Delivery systems sections could be merged over since they are both new content, and decently enough referenced. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 03:17, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

Iron in biology

I recently created the article Iron in biology which for such an important biological concept has not had its own article until now. Does anyone want to help with fleshing it out?Immanuelle 💗 (please tag me) 09:58, 11 June 2022 (UTC)

Requested move of Abiogenesis

A requested move of Abiogenesis to Origin of life is under discussion. Project members are invited to contribute. Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:22, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

AfD for Female (gender)

Comments are requested at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Female (gender). Crossroads ^-talk- 01:15, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

Is there a consensus in biology that race is a social construct?

A tweet by Steven Pinker agreeing with Richard Dawkins agreeing with a list by Jerry Coyne of ideological perversions of science included the idea that race is a social construct. Race (human categorization) claims there is a consensus ("Modern science regards...") about this, which I find hard to square with disagreement by these eminent biologists. Whether race is a valid biological concept is of course a question for biologists, who could situate it in normal taxonomic practice. For example they would know observations like "more genetic variation within groups" was typical among subspecific taxa, whereas a cultural anthropologist or even a medic would likely not. I raised the question of how this consensus was established on the talk page[1], it seems to be merely asserted. Responses were evasive. So perhaps Wikiproject Biology can help. Bogestra Bob (talk) 08:19, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

Jerry Coyne's list is "Ideological distortions of biology". One of his 10 items is:

"C.) The claim that “race” (I prefer “ethnicity”) is purely a social construct with no biological value and containing no biological information [is an ideological distortion of biology]. I don’t believe in “races” as they were classically conceived of by Carleton Coon and others, but humans are genetically different from place to place, and those differences contain information of value in tracing our ancestry and our movement around the globe from Africa."

This is quite a limited statement biologically. He agrees (with the social construct people and others) that the Carleton Coon idea of race is wrong, i.e. there is no hierarchy from ape to African to White Man at the top (there is a clear consensus in biology that that was racist nonsense), but he disagrees insofar as genomics shows genetic differences in different parts of the world (and through history). Biologists in general (if I may be so bold) broadly agree that "race" is a mistaken concept, but they also agree with Coyne/Dawkins (tweet)/Pinker (his tweet) that it's possible to trace gene differences. All three of them are well aware that saying so means treading a narrow path through an ideological minefield. Hope this helps, Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:54, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

How did you establish that biologists in general think that? Bogestra Bob (talk) 09:19, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

A lifetime of reading. If you want immediate evidence, you have the three sources cited here already; if you want another, David Reich's book Who We Are and How We Got Here is a WP:RS, and of course it has been attacked for the reasons I've given. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:35, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

You're saying Dawkins and Coyne think race is a "mistaken concept"? That's a bit of a stretch. Dawkins: "Social construct"? Forget it. Race is biologically real." Reich does indeed say race is a social construct, although it's unclear what he means by this. Greg Mayer quoted by Coyne:

"I also like Reich’s article, but if he hopes to be able to talk about genetic differentiation, he’s going to have to stop accepting the “race is a social construction” fallacy..."[2]

I don't think consensus describes this. Bogestra Bob (talk) 10:14, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

If you know everything already, then don't ask for help. Reich's book makes it clear that there are many genetic differences between populations, something that Coyne, Dawkins, and Pinker all agree with, and that Coonian "races" do not exist, something that the three of them also support. If within that they differ in shades of meaning, that's up to them. I can tell you one thing, which is that many (most?) biologists won't touch this subject with a barge pole, for the exact same reason that I'm not going to any further. I'm out of here, don't ping me. Chiswick Chap (talk) 11:46, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

It's just different definitions. The people saying race is a social construct mean to say that any clearly defined boundary between groups of people (one-drop rule, Ariernachweis, brown race, Caucasian race and so on) is just a random decision someone made, based on their own set of ideas, and could have made differently, and they mean that any differences between such "races" are smaller than the differences within those "races".

The people saying race is not a social construct mean to say that populations with little mixing in the past have slightly different genomes: if your ancestors lived in Central Africa for many generations, you are likely to look similar to other people whose ancestors lived there and different from people whose ancestors lived in China for many generations.

Both statements are true: race is a social construct and not a social construct, depending on what people mean by it. Both groups of biologists are completely in agreement with each other as soon as the statements are broken up into more detailed statements instead of being compressed into the phrase "social construct". --Hob Gadling (talk) 12:52, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

Coyne: "Multilocus groupings of humans, for example, show that they can be divided into various fairly distinct genetic clusters, ranging from 4-7, and which correspond roughly to areas where humans were genetically isolated" Bogestra Bob (talk) 13:27, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

That does not contradict anything I said. --Hob Gadling (talk) 15:53, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

You said the boundaries between races were a "random decision" and that no biologist disagreed with this. Bogestra Bob (talk) 15:57, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

And now ponder the difference between "can be divided into" and "are divided into" as well as the difference between "fairly distinct" and "distinct" and the difference between "correspond roughly" and the sharp line the people who invented the one-drop rule drew. My actual point flew right by your head. I think it would be fruitless if I commented any further. --Hob Gadling (talk) 16:59, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

I'm not sure I need to ponder anything. Coyne is an eminent biologist. You are a Wikipedia editor. Coyne thinks race is not a social construct. What you think is irrelevant. Nevertheless Coyne is applying a typical subspecific model, which often have hybrid zones. This is how race has been conceptualized since Blumenbach. "Sharp lines" is the kind of strawman requirement we find among non biologist sources. A biologist would be embarrassed to write such a thing. This has nothing at all to do with the one drop rule, which is another system. I can agree with your last sentence. Bogestra Bob (talk) 05:52, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

• Agree Biologists in general consider it a social construct. I don't think we'll get a proper survey of biologists views though it might be interesting, and the literature isn't going to be much help either. I'm surprised they stuck their necks out! NadVolum (talk) 14:32, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

  Thanks for commenting but I don't think flat assertions carry any weight. Bogestra Bob (talk) 14:44, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

• Yes That is the general scientific consensus, yes. While there is an acknowledgement that there are genetic compositional differences between groupings of humans, the differences are much more complicated and numerous than the handful of groupings that society has given names to. For the field of pharmacogenomics, for example, there are over a hundred, if not far more, genetic groupings that make up meaningful biological distinctions on a pharmacological level. But those groupings have little relation to the societal ones and the relations between them often are completely contrary to how society commonly groups human populations via the term race. Silverseren^C 06:00, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

  We could check whether your claims are correct by typing "race" or "ancestry" into PubMed to see whether the field typically uses the broad categories or your "over a hundred genetic groupings" which frankly I've never heard of. Bogestra Bob (talk) 06:08, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

• Consensus in the fields of anthropology, human genetics, and taxonomy as applicable to hominoids is that the divisions commonly treated as "races" are fundamentally of social origin, and less informative to misleading in non-social contexts. This is clearly reflected in current literature, and consequently our articles. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 06:32, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

  So they are informative to some degree, in biological contexts? Which is why looking at the genetics literature[3] we can see these categories being used to the present to compare genetic variants between groups. The first result is looking at genetic smoking susceptibility between Europeans and Africans. Look at all of the authors in just that first paper, from yesterday. I guess they don't all think race is just a social construct which only indexes social differences, seeing as they're looking for causal genetic differences. This one paper carries more weight than the couple of opinion pieces the "Modern science regards race as a social construct" in the article is currently based on. Bogestra Bob (talk) 07:43, 5 August 2022 (UTC)