Talk:Struggle for existence

After reading this Wikipedia article, I just have a few suggestions to help expand the information provided and enhance the article overall. First, I believe Wikipedia users could really benefit from an expansion of this article because it is an important concept in not only ecology, but the scientific world as well. In adding new information, reliable references should be added as well in order to encourage further research on topics or people mentioned in the article. For this article to become highly regarded, the more scholarly references the better. Next, I believe adding images would really help the article. Images draw the readers attention and give them a mental picture of the concept. Therefore, I believe the article may get more views if pictures are added to it. One last thing I would suggest would be to at subheadings. With the addition of more information as I said above, it will be possible for the author to create subheadings and help the reader navigate the page better. Since this article seems to only have a lead section, it is basically telling the reading there isn't very much depth to it. Other than those suggestions I think the article is off to a great start with a great foundation of the concept!

Eak016 (talk) 16:33, 10 February 2014 (UTC)Emily Kookogey

Some Suggestions for this article !

"Struggle for Existence" is a very important topic in the history of ecology. After reading this Wiki page, it seemed to me that this page can be improved. With due respect to the previous contributors to this page I am pointing out some weaknesses of this page. I felt like, lead section of the article didn't summarize the article; instead, it basically touches upon the subject. The implication of this Malthus's term his huge in the development of ecological research afterward, but the article takes a very little step to explain the significance of this term. For an amateur reader of ecology or economics may have difficulties to understand the importance of this term, just by reading this article. This article does not have a clear structure. It seemed to me that Darwin get's more emphasis, than the topic. Last three to four paragraphs only talks about Darwin, but Malthus's ideas about "Struggle for Existence" and how he described or explained the term was not talked enough to give readers a clear Idea about the topic. I believe the previous contributors weren't trying to be biased, but they found out about a information what I think is unnecessary. I want to question the importance of the information where the previous contributor/s mentioned a information about Fanny, Malthus's sister. In addition to that, the article didn't provide proper citation for that. This article is not too big, so I understand that there were no need to cite too much, but whatever informations are provided there could have been cited properly Abue.chowdhury (talk) 02:39, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

Suggestions

First, I wanted to thank you for taking the time to start this article and help to expand Wikipedia. I have a few suggestions that will help to improve this article. First, I think that the lead section should be separated and expanded upon. A lead section is important to any Wikipedia article, and the addition of a few facts to the already existent first three sentences of the article will help. Next, I think that a few pictures will help the article’s appearance - possibly Darwin and Malthus. Along the same lines, I believe that too much emphasis is put on Darwin’s work with the struggle for existence. With more research, I believe the article could be strengthened with more information on Malthus and Wallace’s involvement with the struggle for existence. My most important suggestion is to improve the references for the article. Many of the statements in the article could use a reference to a reliable source. For instance, I would consider changing the 3rd reference to www.census.gov in order to make the reference more reliable. I hope these suggestions help in improving this article! Gtn001 (talk) 10:40, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

This is Simple wiki

Suggestions to make the article longer and more complicated suggest that the full force of our wiki title has not been felt. We are not trying to duplicate English wiki, not are we trying to imitate textbooks and academic articles. What we try & do is to give a simple introduction to the topic in simplified language. That's hard enough. Macdonald-ross (talk) 17:06, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

Thanks User:Macdonald-ross for your feedback here. I think there might have been some confusion in the above comments. These comments come from students in my History of Ecology course at Bucknell University. As an assignment, they were to leave suggestions for improving an article on Wikipedia. Another, more recent, assignment had them edit pages to add new information backed by a source. I think they, like me, mistook this page as part of English Wikipedia. So, on behalf of my students, my apologies for overloading the article, though I think they do make good suggestions and made nice edits! --Enstandrew (talk) 01:34, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

That's fine, no harm done. It's a mistake many have made before you! We welcome contributions so long as editors plug in to our mindset. We don't seem to have a page on the History of Ecology... Macdonald-ross (talk) 10:38, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

Another comment

This page is about a metaphor in biology; material about the social effects and extensions into social theory belong on other pages. A single page cannot cover all angles of a topic. Macdonald-ross (talk) 09:34, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

Bibliography for Future Research

Works Cited

Cooper, Gregory John. The science of the struggle for existence: on the foundations of ecology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Darwin, Charles, and J. W. Burrow. "The Struggle for Existence." In The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or, The preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life, 45-58. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.

Fitch, David. "Struggle for Existence." Struggle for Existence. accessed February 24, 2014, http://www.nyu.edu/projects/fitch/courses/evolution/html/struggle_for_existence.html#GeometricPopulationGrowth.

Huxley, Thomas Henry. "The Struggle for Existence in Human Society." In Evolution and ethics and other essays, 195-236. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1899.

Malthus, T. R.. "Chapter 1." In An essay on the principle of population, 2-14. London: J. Johnson, 1798.

McKinney, H. Lewis. Wallace and Natural Selection. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.

Nasmyth, George William. "Darwin's Theory of Social Progress." In Social Progress and the Darwinian Theory; a study of force as a factor in human relations, 268-302. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1916.

Todes, Daniel Philip. Darwin without Malthus the struggle for existence in Russian evolutionary thought. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.