Talk:Biological rules

Attribution

This article was compiled and adapted today from materials in the articles on Allen's rule, Bergmann's rule, Foster's rule, Gloger's rule, Jordan's rule, Rapoport's rule, and Thorson's rule. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:35, 15 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

While containing truly every biological rule is always a work in progress, this page has a large bias in its listing towards the more obscure biological rules rather than the common ones. I'm going to make an effort to continue adding more common or foundational principles of biology to this list, as well as more obscure ones. Bughouse68 (talk) 07:45, 28 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Just one thread for one topic, please. "Making an effort to continue" is *extremely* close to an announcement of edit-warring, given that a) you've been reverted, and b) this discussion is in progress, and nobody else has had a chance to contribute yet. On your assertion that the current rules are "more obscure", no, they are simply the rules whose effects can be seen in evolutionary ecology, such as geographically. If you were to widen the article's scope to include all "foundational principles of biology", it will be indefinitely long as it could cover every regularity or finding in every scientific paper in every field of biology ever written, which is plainly absurd. I'll post on the relevant WikiProjects now so we can have a proper discussion of this major and in my view extremely disruptive and misconceived change to the article. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:29, 28 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I agree having all the rules would end up with a very long page, particularly with the descriptions. I think the functionality of this page having the main description and then "see also" (or similar) pointing to a list or category page of biological rules makes most sense to me.If the rules already exist as their own pages, it seems odd to have them also described here, making it extra long. Not sure if I understand the use of having it described on this page as well.

(As a side note: many of these rules are those named after a person, which could be in itself an interesting category or list) Cyanochic (talk) 03:15, 29 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There are very brief summaries here; full details are in the listed articles. There is clearly scope for a category as you note. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:49, 29 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I guess I'm wondering what the use is of brief summaries of each rule on one page. I'm not saying there isn't one, just that I can't think of one personally. (But I do see the use of having the page with the description section.) Cyanochic (talk) 19:35, 29 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

So that readers can get a quick idea of what the rules are, and can compare them here in one place. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:51, 29 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That's fair. Given the original conversation prompting this was about the "obscurity" of rules, maybe the scope could be more well defined on the page to avoid adding of foundational bio principles vs rules? I'd have to think about how I'd personally define that.

Looking back at what's been edited and reverted - maybe some wording of "correlation between two factors"? Cyanochic (talk) 20:52, 29 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]