RationalWiki talk:EvoWiki/Archive1

Do you need help
Do you need help or is this a crat thing? An iron, yet caring fist 00:10, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Help. This foundation is growing rapidly!!!! -  π    00:11, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * This is still being worked out, but the goal is that anyone who wants to really expand on or work on an article can push a button and take it over here. A few users are given edit rights on evowiki itself to "curate" it as needed. Tmtoulouse (talk) 00:12, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I was wondering why when I tried to create a shark article I could not, even after making an account. Robothead.svg iron, yet caring fist 00:15, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * The basic argument is that their is not enough users on EvoWiki to actively support it. Wiki's rely on collaboration. We also don't want to dilute our user base between overlapping projects. Almost anything at EvoWiki or that could be at EvoWiki can be a good RW article by tightening up the focus a little, or sometimes not even that. Lets bring the material from EvoWiki that we want over and work on it here together, while those interested in setting up evowiki as a good fish bowl can polish things up as a read only site. Tmtoulouse (talk) 00:19, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

The licenses are compatible
No, they're not. Evowiki is CC-BY-NC-SA -- Nx  / talk 18:26, 29 November 2010 (UTC)
 * That could be fixed...Tmtoulouse (talk) 19:06, 29 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Were they? Тy  [[User talk:Ty| Yarrr

]] 15:40, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I never knew about this. I guess CP will have to update their article on evowiki to mention us!--  16:36, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

Guidelines for cribbing EvoWiki material
Am I missing some further discussion on this project? In the course of trying to imagine how to organize and approach an idea I had for improving our creationism and related material to get rid of cruft, update research, adapt to new creationist strategies, etc., I realized we have all this EvoWiki stuff just sitting there ready to use. Some of it's great. Some of it's not. We need decide what to do with it so RW people can start picking at whatever part of the project they feel like helping with. Maybe create a system for tagging Evowiki articles for wholesale transfer, as well as tagging EvoWiki and RW articles for merger (which will obviously require some amount of rewriting and research updating).

I suggest we prioritize the salvage project based on subject matter - with higher priority tasks being closer to our core mission.

Highest priority: General evolution, creationism, and complimentary science articles need to be scoured for on-mission material that's worth cribbing wholesale where we don't have an article on the subject or ours sucks badly. Where we've already got a good article, which is true for many core subjects, supplement with useful EvoWiki material.

Higher priority: Logical fallacies and rhetorical strategies. Need. More. And then wikilink the shit out of it.

High-ish priority: There's a absolutely staggering amount of material refuting creationist claims a la the talk.origins Index of Creationist Claims. I've gone through a few of the hundreds and hundreds of entries and found that it's a confusing mixture of unique and duplicated material. Some entries seem to contain unique prose but identical citations to the creationist and rebuttal sources. Some entries are straight TO. Some are pure EvoWiki. We don't have (and probably don't want) a resource on that scale, but we need to come up with a plan for how to use it to improve RW even if all we do is wikilink terms and concepts in our burgeoning collection of side-by-sides to EvoWiki's treatment. There are enough really abysmal nonsensical poorly written horseshit entries in our side-by-sides that a quick fix would be to at least adapt relevant high quality EvoWiki treatments and update research.

This is a huge undertaking. Let's make it a summer project (haha Southern Hemisphere suckers).

03:41, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

CP's hate continues
I see that Johnny Pratt-face decided to delete CP's entry about EvoWiki. 05:39, 18 June 2011 (UTC)
 * OMIGOD! Who cares what CP does?  06:33, 18 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I don't care, I was merely remarking. FFS.  09:03, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

Request to be a Curator at EvoWiki
I logged on to my account at EvoWiki (after noticing that it was back up after being down for a long time) and found the notice that it is now a project of RationalWiki. After making an account here and reading the "Project Page" I would like to offer my services in the process. You can find my contributions to EvoWiki here, hear me schooling, imho, Kent Hovind here (I call in about 1/3 the way through and point out numerous errors of Kent's for quite a while), and being the only person with my name in the world you can learn anything else you would like to know about me on Google. --RiverBissonnette (talk) 02:22, 7 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Hi River, I have changed your user rights, if it doesnt work or you have any problems or need anything dont hesitate to let me know. Tmtoulouse (talk) 04:17, 7 July 2011 (UTC)
 * I have recently have been going to random pages, checking "recent changes", and checking my previous contributions, but before I start to make changes I had a few questions...


 * What are the priorities? Sections, Topics, Specific Articles?
 * Should articles be combined, grouped, etc... basically is there a formatting protocol?
 * Where would you like me to put the page that lists changes?
 * Is there a time frame for anything?
 * Should I continue to update "In the News"?


 * Thanks for your assistance--RiverBissonnette (talk) 20:13, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

Autorise me at EvoWiki
Dear Administrators. I would like do defend the creationism as a refutable scientific concept; the article to be discussed is at EvoWiki. I made the account, but it happens to be not valid for EvoWiki. Will you consider please to extend my account to EvoWiki too? Sincerely, Dmitrii Kouznetsov (talk) 15:47, 7 July 2011 (UTC).

Somebody wanna look at this and put it in the right place
BoN: this page is about the Wiki, NOT evolution.Pippa (talk) 19:16, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

Human evolution
The recent African origin model has one flaw: it implies that one type of human outcompeted other types of early humans. There is compelling ethological evidence that apes can cooperate well in situations where there is no risk of deception, and that their egoism and so-called inability to cooperate is just necessary adaptations to a “society” full of deception. This proves that human cooperativeness can only have evolved by avoiding competition, ruling out any notion of competitive human evolution (or at least any notion that the last steps from premodern to modern humans was anyhow competitive). The genetic evidence for recent African origin? Comparative genetic studies of humans and chimpanzees show that the (modern) human genome is smaller (contains less DNA) than the chimpanzee genome, which means that much of human evolution was about losing rather than creating DNA. Since loss of disadvantageous DNA is logically far more likely to repeat identically independently than the creation of new DNA is (losing is losing is losing, but there is many ways to create new functions), this redeems the multiregional model from theoretical genetic debunkal. The fact that Neanderthal nuclei DNA was discovered in non-African living humans despite the fact that no mitochondrial evidence of such admixture exists proves conclusively that mitochondria can be every bit as deceptive as looks can, as well as that different types of early humans were not fully genetically isolated from each other. Then there is the fact that most modern human genetic variation is in Africa. That may seem conclusive, but the avoid competition model provides an explanation. Since avoiding competition was crucial for the origin of trust, it was also crucial for the origin of storytelling (what is the point in telling stories if everyone thinks you are lying?). That (modern) humans outlive their reproductive ability certainly evolved because storytellers could favor their own genes by telling stories and teaching knowledge to younger relatives, increasing their chance of survival. The first proto-humans to leave Africa should logically have been the first to successfully avoid competition, while the Africans had to wait until so many proto-humans had left Africa that competition within Africa (over land and resources) ceased, giving the emigrants a head start in storytelling. There is compelling epidemiological evidence that genes that increase the risk of cardiovascular disease is strongly overrepresented among Africans and strongly underrepresented among East Asians. Since the avoid competition model suggests that the first proto-humans to leave Africa should in the end have ended up far from Africa (e.g. in East Asia), the greater genetic diversity among Africans may be because they have had less time to adapt biologically to storytelling, leaving them with many short-lifespan genes, while East Asians, descended from the first proto-humans to successfully avoid competition, had much longer time for such evolution, leaving them with much fewer short-lifespan genes. Any moral accusations of this model being “racist” are debunked by the fact that it basically says that our ancestors did NOT murder and oppress, making it absurd to think of it as any kind of excuse for murdering and oppressing. Of course it can be abused if out of context quotation is used, but the out of context quotators can prove anything they want (even that Darwin denied that the eye could have evolved!), so it does not matter. That Neanderthals and Denisovans retained non-modern genotypes can be explained by the fact that they, due to the fact that they in periods were trapped in a glaciated climate, suffered famine and had to compete against each other over food during those periods, which caused their adaptation to storytelling to halt temporarily but recurrently, slowing it down long-term. There is, after all, genetic evidence that Australians 60000 years ago had unusual genes that then were selected against and disappeared locally, strengthening some form of more complicated model of how we became modern humans

Some, including Robin Dunbar, claim that intelligence evolved for maintaining social relationships. Howewer, meerkats have far more social relationships than their small brain capacity would suggest. Another hypothesis is that it is actually intelligence that causes social relationships to become more complex, because intelligent individuals are more difficult to learn to know. There is also studies that show that Dunbars number is not the upper limit of the number of social relationships in humans either. One problem with the sexual selection theory is that both sexes are intelligent. In most species, only males have impressive ornaments and show-off behavior, in seahorses (where females gestate) only females have, and in hermaphrodites such attributes are completely absent. Sexual selection can therefore not account for why both men and women are intelligent. The idea that a currently ongoing increase in human brain size should have anything to do with intelligence is dismissed by mathemathical calculations confirmed by modern research on dementia showing that brain size only correlate with intelligence in a causal way below about half modern human average brain size. Brain capacity beyond that is related to body mass or is redundancy. comparative studies of cognition in great apes and human children prove that the effects of brain capacity are easily distinguishable from the effects of experience (IQ tests for humans just fail to discover it due to their focus on mental age, combination of everything into a total score, and human redundancy of brain capacity) and that difference may have implications for the chance of survival under certain circumstances. The statement that such high intelligence "lack survival value", which is used by believers in social intelligence and sexual selection, invariably assumes a stable environment. If climate change is factored in, howewer, the evolution of human intelligence can be perfectly explained by flexible problem solving during those climate changes.

I've Nowikied it to clear the multiple refs (is it copypasted from somewhere?)

Request For EvoWiki Curator Status
I was wondering if I could be promoted to curator so I can edit EvoWiki pages? I used to be an editor at EvoWiki before it shut down due to server problems, and I want to get back to editing there.--Apokryltaros (talk) 07:48, 12 November 2012 (UTC)
 * You can request curator status from Trent, but EvoWiki is no longer a going concern. If you want to contribute, consider it a hulk to be cannibalized for material consistent with RW's mission, as there's no point in the RWF maintaining multiple projects with overlapping material that have the potential of leaching traffic from RW. [[file:Nuttysig.svg|68px|link=User:Nutty Roux|Nutty Roux]]100x100 anarchy symbol.svg 18:13, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

Request for curator.
See the title. I love evolutionary biology, and I feel that I could really help clean up and update the wiki. Peter and I talked about this a few weeks ago, but apparently the conversation had a heart attack on New Year's. I'd really enjoy working on this project.  Immortality's fun, except when you become a two-headed monster Talk to me or view my art 16:11, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm a curator but I'm not going to help you clean up or update EvoWiki. If you want to help, please look for content that you think is consistent with RW's mission, whether to supplement existing articles or add something new. I got jacked up with work and then a career change after I started looking at reworking our logical fallacies material to incorporate some of the excellent resources at EvoWiki. I've got a taxonomy of formal and informal fallacies somewhere in my userspace. They've also got a substantial amount of anti-creationist material. Some of it is wretched. Some of it essentially reproduces Talk.origins material. Some of it only looks like it's TO material, but actually includes original cites that need to be updated by someone with access to JSTOR. Trent and I have both asked for people to brainstorm approaching EW in various ways similar to what I'm suggesting here rather than working on the wiki itself. It's no longer in production mode and I don't believe Trent has any intention of opening it back up. It's actually pretty hopelessly fucked in some ways because of the way the wiki was incompletely exported. You can make a list of articles you'd like exported anywhere in my userspace and I'll get on it ASAP. [[file:Nuttysig.svg|68px|link=User:Nutty Roux|Nutty Roux]]100x100 anarchy symbol.svg 18:11, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Personally, it would be a labour of love for me even if nobody else wants to work on it. I feel EvoWiki has some things that's valuable but not relevant to RationalWiki. Please simply vouchsafe me the ability to edit EvoWiki. I don't believe EvoWiki's completely hopeless, and if I do anything you don't like, just contact me and I'll undo it. Thank you. Planaria_Icon.png Immortality's fun, except when you become a two-headed monster Talk to me or view my art 00:11, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
 * No. [[file:Nuttysig.svg|68px|link=User:Nutty Roux|Nutty Roux]]100x100 anarchy symbol.svg 02:10, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Request for curator
I surfed here while searching for rebuttals to "Life--How Did It Get Here? By Evolution or By Creation?". There is a page listing a lot of the arguments in the book, but not all of them. I've got detailed notes on pretty much all the arguments they use, and I could add them to the page making it much more complete, if you let me. If not, tell me how I can send it to you to let someone else add it. --Mithcoriel (talk) 17:32, 12 December 2013 (UTC)
 * I think Evo Wiki is permanently locked as an archive. May I suggest adding relevant details to this instead? Zero (talk) 17:40, 12 December 2013 (UTC)