In the light of evolution: essays from the laboratory and field Jonathan Losos, eds 2011. Roberts and Company Publishers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the light of evolution: essays from the laboratory and field Jonathan Losos , eds 2011 . Roberts and Company Publishers My job requires me to read and critique papers in evolutionary biology almost every day, so it’s understandable to say that seldom do I want to spend my evenings reading more evolutionary biology. This book is the rare exception. In ‘In the light of evolution…’, Jonathan Losos has assembled a remarkably accessible, highly readable, informative and entertaining series of 17 essays by prominent evolutionary biologists, historians, science writers and paleontologists. Most essays include background on how the author became interested in their field, a discussion of the main findings of their work so far, and a summary of where they expect their research to go in the future. However, while the reader is given a comprehensive overview of several key study systems in evolutionary biology, what’s most impressive in this book is how the essays are delivered. Most of the chapters are so captivating that you find yourself wanting them not to end. My favourite four or five essays made me feel that I’d just come home from a delightful chat with the authors over drinks. Of course, not all of the essays leave you breathless, in fact some are downright stilted and you’d probably be better off reading the primary literature on the same topic. The biggest omission was the complete absence of essays by botanists. Surely charismatic ‘plant’ people like Spencer ‘swashbuckler’ Barrett, Loren ‘Michelangelo’ Rieseberg, and Doug ‘rock star’ Schemske could all have made wonderful contributions to this volume. However, the pros far outweigh the cons in this case and Losos has done a wonderful job putting together a book that’s sure to be found on the night tables of both armchair and seasoned scientists alike.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".