User talk:Mikems

Proteaceae

Dude, no-one but Harry Levin believes this ridiculous notion that Proteaceae arose in the Carboniferous. Please don't keep inserting it unless you can provide a reliable source for the claim; e.g. a peer-reviewed botany journal. An online essay doesn't cut the mustard when it comes to fringe theories like this. Hesperian 05:55, 9 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

On reviewing your contributions, your identity is pretty obvious: it is clear that you are here to promote your own website. And unfortunately I see that to that purpose you have inserted an awful lot of dubious information here. Please, do not continue to use Wikipedia this way. Wikipedia is not supposed to be a forum for the promotion of novel, unpublished theories, not matter who meritorious they are; and it is also not a link farm. Hesperian 04:03, 10 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Please do not continue to promote www.flwildflowers.com

If you have a close connection to some of the people, places or things you have written about in the article Proteaceae, you may have a conflict of interest. In keeping with Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy, edits where there is a conflict of interest, or where such a conflict might reasonably be inferred from the tone of the edit and the proximity of the editor to the subject, are strongly discouraged. If you have a conflict of interest, you should avoid or exercise great caution when:

editing or creating articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with;
participating in deletion discussions about articles related to your organization or its competitors; and
linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam).

Please familiarize yourself with relevant policies and guidelines, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, verifiability of information, and autobiographies.

For information on how to contribute to Wikipedia when you have conflict of interest, please see our frequently asked questions for organizations. For more details about what, exactly, constitutes a conflict of interest, please see our conflict of interest guidelines. Specifically, do not add, "Links that appear to promote otherwise obscure individuals by pointing to their personal pages." -- Atama ^chat 05:49, 10 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Levin's ideas deserve consideration and debate on their own merit. No one has challenged his charts of the relationship of plant families over time and their dispersal over continents. Failure to recognize that someone outside of a small group of scientists - who may not always see the larger picture - has acquired expertise and maintains a differing hypothesis and has actually may have a point worth debating is this website's problem, not Levin's. He's entirely rational. I'm sure he'd like to hear from you. He's almost 90 years old and not able to appear at conferences, although he has been invited. He's at harrylevin@gmail.com. Your idea that I am using your page would make sense only if my pages hadn't been up since 1995. My site is already ranked at the top in Google of more than 12 million websites on flowers in Florida. It can't get any higher.

It doesn't matter how popular you think your site is at this point, what matters is that Wikipedia frowns heavily on any entity drawing attention to their own website in articles, and if you continue to do so you're likely only going to find your attempts reverted, so there's little point in trying. -- Atama ^chat 20:58, 14 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The self-appointed technician-watchdogs who guard the Proteaceae pages seem to be not much different than the Spanish inquisitors of ca. 1500. Instead of addressing the real issues raised by Dr. Levin, they would like to censor anyone who has not met their very peculiar idea of what science is all about. True scientists are schooled in the universal appreciation for the history of science as well as the liberal arts. Having access to an electron microscope doesn't make anyone more of a scientist than someone who is able to analyze the evidence on his own, synthesize, and come up with theories that may run against the grain. Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winning physicist, wrote "Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers in the preceeding generation . . . As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." The Pleasure of Finding Things Out as quoted in American Scientist v. 87, p. 462 (1999) As I pointed out before, Kuhn, one of the great modern philosophers of science, demonstrates that a strict adherence to protocol takes second seat to ingenuity and invention. This peculiar narrow mindedness and petulant and what seem personal attacks on Mr. Levin (and on me) are actually beneath contempt.Mikems (talk) 04:50, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]