On 3/25/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Thomas Dalton wrote:
It's rather difficult to understand what you're asking, because BY definition, endemic to Chicago means it is native to Chicago, and means
it
is NOT native to the rest of the USA. Do you have an example animal
here
that is not endemic to Chicago, but is native to Chicago but not all of
the
USA? "Native to only X but not all of Y," if Y is not a subset of X,
and if
X is a subset of Y, is endemism, nothing else.
You're misquoting me. I said "Native to X but not all of Y", not "Native to *only* X but not all of Y", there is a big difference.
A bird which is native to Chicago and Rockford and nowhere else is not endemic to Chicago, or endemic to Rockford, or native to the whole of N. America.
The problem here is that the use of "endemic" by biologists is different from its use by the general population. For a biologist there are denotations of limitation or origination, while for the general population including epidemiologists there is a stronger tendency to view the term as saying only that the condition is regularly. The two groups would give a different answer to the question, "Is the European starling endemic to the Chicago area?"
Ec
In articles on species the word is wikilinked to its correct definition, and, because of this duality of meaning, I generally parenthetically include its biological meaning in the article.
On 3/25/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
It's rather difficult to understand what you're asking, because BY definition, endemic to Chicago means it is native to Chicago, and means
it
is NOT native to the rest of the USA. Do you have an example animal
here
that is not endemic to Chicago, but is native to Chicago but not all of
the
USA? "Native to only X but not all of Y," if Y is not a subset of X,
and if
X is a subset of Y, is endemism, nothing else.
You're misquoting me. I said "Native to X but not all of Y", not "Native to *only* X but not all of Y", there is a big difference.
A bird which is native to Chicago and Rockford and nowhere else is not endemic to Chicago, or endemic to Rockford, or native to the whole of N. America.
Actually this is considered endemic if it both populations are relictual populations from a once more widespread area. This is the definition of endemic in biology and for relictual populations with bimodal distributions. It means what you keep saying it doesn't mean, and it is used in botany how you say it can't be used, so I don't think we can go any further discussing it.
On 3/25/07, *Thomas Dalton* thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Point remains, we don't use primary sources in the plant articles, such as the original research of a scientist published in a primary resource otherwise known as a peer-reviewed journal article, but rather we use the secondary information from the primary source, the primary source's introductory material or background material used in its conclusions, and use review articles (which, although this may be changing, not that I've seen) rather than conclusions originally and solely drawn in primary sources.
You could use primary sources, though. There is no rule against that. (You have to be careful to keep things neutral, but that shouldn't be too hard with papers about plants - just be careful if there is disagreement in the scientific community about something.) There is a rule against OR, which is why it's important to distinguish between the two. No, we can't realistically use primary sources for many things in a rapidly changing field like Botany or among the photosynthetic protists, because the primary sources are, today, proposing radically new taxonomies of various groups, some based upon controversial techniques such as environmental sampling of DNA, rather than culturing of organisms. What we do is quote the primary source if it is an important paper, but by the time it is an important paper, there are plenty of secondary sources confirming its importance with relevant discussions of it. Photosynthetic single-celled eukaryotic groups are placed at higher taxonomic levels all over the place, every once in a while we have someone come in and, in good faith, change the color code for these groups to lavendar or something.
We do use the primary sources, but under careful circumstances, and after confirmation of their importance. There was an article that blew me away a couple of months ago in AJBotany, yet has made hardly a splash in the academic community, so I have to wait. Another plant family that I have been studying in the Chinese fossil record as a major contribution to basal angiosperm evolution recently made Nature, so we're good to go there. But, if I went with primary sources, Wikipedia would not be a useful source for people to come to to find information about botany.
There is nothing neutral going on in botany today, it's massive upheaval, guarding of the old, fanning of the new, reassertion of the old, fights about molecular techniques versus morphology, cladistics or not, the entire basic classification scheme is in high disagreement. It's fun, but it's not neutral.
KP