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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Evotext: A New Tool For Analyzing The Biological Sciences, Grant Ramsey, Charles H. Pence
Evotext: A New Tool For Analyzing The Biological Sciences, Grant Ramsey, Charles H. Pence
Faculty Publications
We introduce here evoText, a new tool for automated analysis of the literature in the biological sciences. evoText contains a database of hundreds of thousands of journal articles and an array of analysis tools for generating quantitative data on the nature and history of life science, especially ecology and evolutionary biology. This article describes the features of evoText, presents a variety of examples of the kinds of analyses that evoText can run, and offers a brief tutorial describing how to use it.
Is Genetic Drift A Force?, Charles H. Pence
Is Genetic Drift A Force?, Charles H. Pence
Faculty Publications
One hotly debated philosophical question in the analysis of evolutionary theory concerns whether or not evolution and the various factors which constitute it (selection, drift, mutation, and so on) may profitably be considered as analogous to “forces” in the traditional, Newtonian sense. Several compelling arguments assert that the force picture is incoherent, due to the peculiar nature of genetic drift. I consider two of those arguments here—that drift lacks a predictable direction, and that drift is constitutive of evolutionary systems—and show that they both fail to demonstrate that a view of genetic drift as a force is untenable. I go …