Relevant literature distribution and Johnson - some numbers

Wesley R. Elsberry (welsberr@inia.cls.org)
Thu, 23 Sep 1999 11:06:44 -0500 (CDT)

Johnson takes up fossil considerations in "Darwin On Trial".
I decided to look at an authority mentioned by Johnson to see
if Johnson's claim concerning most relevant research being
found in the pages of four periodicals held up to scrutiny.

I looked at the references from Ernst Mayr's essay 26 in
"Towards a New Philosophy of Biology", titled "Speciational
Evolution Through Punctuated Equilibria". Johnson uses quotes
from Mayr in that essay in "Darwin On Trial". I went through
the references at the end of the essay and tallied those
periodical references in Johnson's "in" group, and those in
the "out" group. Results:

In Out
---- -----
11 45

"In" group representation = 11/56 = 0.196

Last I checked, 0.196 was less than 0.5.

Pennock's "Tower Of Babel" yielded

In Out
---- -----
7 54

"In" group representation = 7/61 = 0.115

Again, a mere fraction of "most".

It is harder to analyze Johnson's own "Darwin On Trial", as there
is no separate references section. However, one can look at his
research notes. I'll even exclude the legal references and not
count each Gould essay (which appeared in Natural History
before being collected into the cited book forms), which should
aid Johnson considerably on the numbers. Results:

In Out
---- -----
20 37

"In" group representation = 20/57 = 0.351

Perhaps other people would care to examine the
representational percentages of citations in other sources and
compare notes.

Wesley