Talk:Evolutionary developmental biology

Lead is short

According to Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section, the lead is to contain an overview of the article content. The lead in this article is too short. --Ettrig (talk) 13:06, 18 October 2016 (UTC)

Yes, of course. I had been waiting until the main sections were written before attempting to summarize them. I have added a summary now. Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:18, 19 October 2016 (UTC)

History in non-history chapter

The article has a history chapter that is a large percentage of the article. Historical content, like

Many of these organisms share the same structural genes for body-building proteins like collagen and enzymes, but biologists had expected that each group of animals would have its own rules of development. The surprise of evo-devo is that the shaping of bodies is controlled by a rather small percentage of genes, and that these regulatory genes are ancient, shared by all animals.

and

The puzzle of how embryonic development was controlled began to be solved using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism. The step-by-step control of its embryogenesis was visualized by attaching fluorescent dyes of different colours to specific types of protein made by genes expressed in the embryo. A dye such as green fluorescent protein, originally from a jellyfish, was typically attached to an antibody specific to a fruit fly protein, forming a precise indicator of where and when that protein appeared in the living embryo. The pax-6 gene controls development of eyes of different types across the animal kingdom. Using such a technique, in 1994 Walter Gehring found that the pax-6 gene, vital for forming the eyes of fruit flies, exactly matches an eye-forming gene in mice and humans. The same gene was quickly found in many other groups of animals, such as squid, a cephalopod mollusc. Biologists including Ernst Mayr had believed that eyes had arisen in the animal kingdom at least 40 times, as the anatomy of different types of eye varies widely.

Should be put in that (history) chapter. --Ettrig (talk) 13:18, 18 October 2016 (UTC)

Thank you. Of course, everything we write and cite is history, we can't write articles about the future or even the present. I thought it necessary to set this (from one perspective) very new field in the context of 200 years of history; and from another perspective, to attempt to separate out some of the richly interwoven strands like Deep Homology to help readers navigate around what is quite a complex story - to give them structure and points of reference. Obviously, when covering a field from different points of view, some of the material can always be presented in different ways, whether "History" or as "topics", it's a matter of judgement. There can't be any "right answer" here. But if I were to pull out the materials you mention from the Deep Homology section, there would be almost nothing left; or we'd create a large amount of overlap, and we all try hard to avoid repetition. So rather than think of it as a "non-history chapter", whatever that might be, just think of it as varying the focus, or pointing the spotlight in specific directions to light up one player on the stage at a time. Chiswick Chap (talk) 15:46, 18 October 2016 (UTC)

You explain the problem very well. Yes, it is a complex story. Complex organisms are built by complex machineries. Those complex machineries are modified successively. We need to have a picture of how the machinery is defined (genes) and how it works, as a background to descriptions of what happens when it changes. But this text almost doesn't start to describe this. Instead it is filled with historical anectdotes. If these anecdotes are moved to where they belong, then there is "almost nothing left". Exactly! There is very little about the basic substance of the topic. This becomes clear when the statements are sorted under the correct headlines. I don't mean to complain. This is a nice text. I am just pointing out adjustments that are needed to arrive at a Good Article state. --Ettrig (talk) 17:47, 18 October 2016 (UTC)

Thank you, but I don't agree at all. There are no anecdotes at all, only cited and reliably sourced evidence. What I am explaining is that the article looks at the subject from different perspectives. It covers the material, but it would only repeat itself (worded differently) if we put everything into first a historical format, then a topic format. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:05, 18 October 2016 (UTC)

Yes, evidently we differ on such a fundamental point as whether the content can and should be divided into the categories that the headlines define. I think it can and should. To me this is so fundamental that it is very difficult to find any values that are even more fundamental and can be used to motivate this principle. For the time being, I hope for a reaction from the GA reviewer. --Ettrig (talk) 05:48, 19 October 2016 (UTC)

What is fundamentally wrong about describing a topic with its history and its major subtopics? One might have thought that was a necessity for any article. Chiswick Chap (talk) 06:20, 19 October 2016 (UTC)