Some interesting things

Here are some web pages you might be interested in. They are presented simply because I think they are interesting and ought to be more widely known.

• A web page Wayne Maddison and I made in 1998 for the European Community Summer School on Methods for Molecular Phylogenies. It was held at the Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, England. The fun part is the graphic of an evolutionary tree (made out of what symbols?) leading to the images of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, with their respective symbols for differentiation beside the branches.

• ROMMY II. Ever wonder what the hard core of the Hennig Society really thinks? Bob Murphy of the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada lets it all hang out. His rock opera is an invaluable historical document of the conflicts in systematics and molecular evolution.

• A photo given me by the late Alan Robertson. It shows attendees at a meeting on evolution in Italy, the International Union of Biological Sciences Symposium on Genetics of Population Structure in 1953. The image is a large (over 500k) JPG file. A list of the people is shown, and you can click on their pictures to see web pages briefly describing them. Even without this you should readily recognize Mather, Ford, Mayr, Waddington, Haldane, Dobzhansky, Fisher, Carson, Robertson, and Falconer.

• J. B. S. Haldane has frequently been credited with the remark that he would not lay down his life for his brother, but would for two brothers or eight first cousins. (Haldane had no brothers, and his sister, the novelist Naomi Mitchison, outlived him). Here is a passage in a 1955 paper where he shows that he appreciated many of the points made in 1964 in W. D. Hamilton's famous work on kin selection.

• Even earlier, the great figure of modern animal breeding, Jay Lush, appreciated the logic of kin and group selection as early as 1948, as can be seen in the quote here.

• And of course, if anyone gives me an honorary degree, that is by definition a cool event, in this case on 30 November 2005 at the University of Edinburgh.
  Joe Felsenstein