Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!bionet!kristoff From: kristoff@genbank.bio.net (David Kristofferson) Newsgroups: bionet.population-bio Subject: Re: Please read Message-ID: Date: 3 Oct 90 18:14:20 GMT References: <3262.27087b8c@cc.helsinki.fi> <90276.104313JAHAYES@MIAMIU.BITNET> Organization: GenBank Online Service Lines: 42 > I have to disagree with Dr. Kristofferson (hope I got that right!). Yes, but as you can tell from my signature I don't usually pay too much attention to announcing my degree 8-)! > Last winter I posted a request for suggested references on the > interaction between gene flow and local selection, and got zero > responses. I eventually found a couple of references myself (but, > the paper I needed them for was rejected anyway :-( ). Sorry to hear that. Being a former veteran of the publish or perish wars, I am acutely aware of the problem of divulging one's ideas. However, I often found when reading the literature that published papers were skimpy on details or perhaps raised interpretations of data with which I disagreed. I would feel perfectly comfortable discussing these points with competitors at meetings without feeling that I was compromising my position. I've always wondered why this type of exchange that goes on at meetings couldn't happen here. Actually I have seen people like Joel Felsenstein respond to queries on this newsgroup, so there have been brief flurries of messages, but the overall statistics for POPULATION-BIOLOGY have been pretty paltry, despite the fact that it garnered an initial vote of approval from the community. Perhaps either the readership should start using the group more regularly or else perhaps we should just close it down for lack of interest?? I have hesitated to suggest that to date because it requires extremely little effort to maintain once it is set up. My general hope remains that even if it takes another 5-10 years to build of a sufficient population of net-wise population biologists, this group may yet take off. I'd love to see it happen sooner, but there is not much I can do other than send in these exhortations once in a while. It's the readers' forum, and its success or failure is in their hands. -- Sincerely, Dave Kristofferson GenBank Manager kristoff@genbank.bio.net