Welcome to the web home of the Stoltzfus research group at The Institute Formerly Known as CARB.
CD: Glossary of Terms
This is a preliminary effort to start a glossary. The current form is going to be extremely difficult to maintain, so I'll probably come up with something different in the future.
| Term | Synonyms | Cross-reference | Significance | Usage example | CD reference | other reference | |
| effectively neutral | neutral | One allele is effectively neutral with regard to another allele if their difference in fitness is of a magnitude that would have a negligible effect on the probability of fixation of a new allele. In practice, this means a difference |s| << (2Ne)^-1, or |s| << (4Ne)^-1 for diploids. | |||||
| Modern Synthesis | synthetic theory, modern neo-Darwinism | ||||||
| nearly neutral | slightly deleterious | Soon after the neutral theory was proposed, Ohta realized that fixation by drift might be significant not just for "effectively neutral" alleles, but for slightly deleterious ones. She called this the "nearly neutral" theory. | |||||
| neutral | effectively neutral, nearly neutral | For proponents, "neutral" typically means "effectively neutral"; for opponents, it may mean the same thing, but it frequently refers to a hypothetical difference in genotype that has no effect on fitness, i.e., s = 0. | |||||
| >personalizing | framing an argument in terms of persons, their characteristics, and their beliefs, rather than in terms of the logic and evidence pertaining to the status of a proposition. | ||||||
| school of thought | A group of people who agree among themselves that they are right, or at least that they are traveling on the path of rightness, as opposed to those other idiots who don't know what they are doing. | ||||||
| straw man | To "attack a straw man" is to argue against a proposition similar, but not identical, to the proposition at issue; or to argue against a position different from than that stated or held by an opponent. Frequently "straw man" is used as an adjective, as in "that's a straw man argument". | ||||||
| theory1 | theory | theory2 | a major conjecture or systematic hypothesis to account for observed phenomena, as in "prion theory of disease" or "Lamarck's theory of evolution" | Kimura's neutral theory1 proposes that most molecular changes result from random fixation of effectively neutral alleles. | theory_vs_theory | ||
| theory2 | theory | theory1 | the body of abstract principles relevant to some discipline, methodology or problem area, as in "music theory" or "population genetics theory" | Sorry, I have to go home and study for my music theory exam tomorrow. | theory_vs_theory |