Blog Posts By Category

A Major Post (176)

• STEAMplant project brings local primary school kids to Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden
• The first product of a three-year-long Faculty Learning Community project
• I will be a 2019-2020 Center for Teaching & Learning Fellow
• An analysis of my course evaluations (Spring 2019)
• How does this professor really spend his work time? (Spring 2019)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2019)
• Eco-Performance Lab during Pratt’s 2019 Green Week the first step of “To the Core of Me”
• My newest STEAMplant collaboration is “To the Core of Me: A Hike Play”
• My interview with Ardis DeFreece has been published in SciArt Magazine
• How does this professor really spend his work time? (Fall 2018)
• Professor Jensen’s Guide to Urban Cycling
• My entry on the evolution of play will be added to the massive Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science
• I will present my EnviroAtlas class activities at NCSE 2018
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2017)
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Pratt Math & Science Department conducts search for new Chairperson
• Transfer of Learning FLC to present at Pratt lunch event
• Urban Transect Walks: helping your students see the overlap between ecological and social patterns
• Hey, ho, Portland Oregon ESA 2017, let’s go!
• Moral Sense III approaches, June 2nd at St. Francis College
• My review of new edited Trophic Ecology book out in the Quarterly Review of Biology
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2017)
• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• Republicans release climate change plan based on “Respiration Reduction”
• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Eco 101: Exponential Growth & Decay
• What in Darwin’s name was I thinking? (#001)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2016)
• Celebrating Studio Days (Fall 2016)
• Julia Buntaine explores the potential power of art and science collaborations
• My ecological footprint for 2016-2017
• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• An inspiring summit, but big challenges at home and afar…
• Sustainability Summit at Pratt Institute featuring Josh Fox
• How Moodle allows you to remove your bias when grading quizzes
• I’ll be spreading the Learning Management System love at Pratt in early November
• My article on adolescence featured in the This View of Life culture series
• An analysis of my course evaluations for Spring 2016
• A Tribute to Dr. David Becker on the Occasion of his Retirement
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2016)
• Pratt Foundation teams up with Brooklyn College pyschologists to study perception and drawing
• Soon-to-be released Evolution and Human Culture book to feature my testimonial
• My ecological footprint for 2015-2016
• FDA investigators raid American Society of Human Genetics offices in Carl Zimmer cloning case
• Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson liberated after month-long kidnapping ordeal
• America Society of Primatologists condemns H. A. and Margret Rey, calls for Curious George boycott
• Alternative music legend Morrissey agrees to adopt 2 million feral cats in win-win for felines, Australian native fauna
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• Great conversation at my Columbia University Population Biology Seminar talk
• I am honored to be visiting the Green Meadow Waldorf School as part of their week-long Sustainability workshop
• My next Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk: Columbia University on March 7th, 2016
• I visit Pratt’s Poetics Lab focused on play
• What do we know about Cultural Transmission?
• Eco 101: Carrying Capacity
• End: Sabbatical; Resume: Teaching
• Is New York City a “sustainable” metropolis?
• Is there a trade-off between reproduction and creativity?
• My personal experience that creationists gravitate to anything with even the faintest scent of scientific uncertainty (and what to do about it)
• Lev Ginzburg Fest: celebration of a “retirement”
• It was an honor to talk to St. Francis College!
• My first “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators” talk: next Friday at St. Francis College
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• How much impact can a set of free game theory infographics have?
• Crucial climate talks in Paris take place in a socially repressive environment
• Review of William B. Provine’s “The ‘Random Genetic Drift’ Fallacy”
• Polygyny: the culture we dislike might not be the culture that is evolutionarily disfavored
• Pivot #1: My popular science book idea may not get picked up by a literary agent
• Yeah, you can find me on Facebook and Google Plus now
• What open access evangelists often miss about the task at hand
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• My testimonial for Gregory Tague’s “Evolution and Human Culture”
• The often-large difference between “breeding” and “parenting”
• Anne-Marie Slaughter on the tradeoff between work and caregiving
• Returning (somewhat reluctantly) to Twitter
• WmD Episode #00003 has been released
• WmD Episode #00002 has been released
• An analysis of my course evaluations for Spring 2015
• My new favorite concept mapping activity: depicting whole-system ecological flows
• Evolution beyond adaptation: a critical step for evolutionary theory
• WmD Episode #00001 has been released!
• Sabbatical, Sweet Sabbatical
• Celebrating Studios Days Spring 2015
• My ecological footprint for 2014-2015
• Envirolutions brings bottle transformation to Green Week 2015
• How stupid professorial attitudes towards Wikipedia are making students less savvy
• The Altruist theme is live and done on this site
• The Big Questions in Ecology and Evolution
• E&E in A&D: Genetic profiling as art?
• E&E in A&D: The Armstrong Lie
• Our paper on a super-rational solution to the tragedy of the commons published in Scientific Reports
• The forces of cultural evolution push hard on political humor
• I am taking my semester of rest… come Fall 2015
• My review of the “Encyclopedia of Theoretical Ecology” published in QRB
• Basic instructions for making effective concept maps using VUE
• Today I am Associate Professor
• A modest presentation on Open Information Environments
• Review of What We Made by Tom Finkelpearl
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• Choosing a more sustainable web host
• Do humans form genetically similar social groups independent of kinship?
• My Evolution 2014 talk is on YouTube
• Evolution 2014: Overall Impressions
• Evolution 2014: Day 4
• Evolution 2014: Day 3
• Evolution 2014: Day 2
• Evolution 2014: Day 1
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Evolution 2014: Preview
• Open Information Environments and the 21st Century College Classroom
• Moodle Tip: Using anchor links to create your own course page menu
• Our review paper on Late Pleistocene Extinction Modeling published in QRB!
• Envirolutions graduates its largest (and most celebrated) cohort
• It appears that Pratt is going to keep me
• There’s No Such Thing as Qualitative Sustainability
• New glacial maximum on Mount ARC provides definitive evidence that Pratt’s sustainability efforts are working
• I receive funding to initiate the WmD Project
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• Taking risks for the data
• Barash the gene accountant on that little economic driver called “reproduction”
• An amazing indictment of the academic publishing industry (in which most of us participate)
• For the next eight months, the future of my career is (mostly) out of my hands
• My review of “Origins of Altruism and Cooperation” is published in QRB
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Where to publish in ecology & evolution without funding for page charges
• My decision to make my course evaluations public
• How will I deliver conceptual understanding?
• Embarking on a grand experiment in conceptual teaching
• Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno
• Working on a VUE concept map of the fieldTest simulation
• “The Sustainable Use of Fisheries” now a part of the EcoEd Digital Library
• Pratt Institute holds 124th Commencement, special gallery show
• Rhett Bradbury’s Master’s Thesis explores how gaming can foster political leadership
• Envirolutions asks the Pratt community to identify where there is “room for improvement”
• My review of Railsback and Grimm’s “Agent-based and individual-based modeling” textbook published in Ecology
• Envirolutions club launches its “Room for Improvement” campaign
• Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
• Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
• Mishele Lesser’s Genoscapes explores the meaning of human genetics
• Pratt Envirolutions Students Bring Recycling Bins to Campus
• Concept mapping as a creative tool
• Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• My review of “How Species Interact” published in Ecological Modelling
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• ESA 2012 Workshop #8, Getting off the Ground with Individual-Based Modeling: A Primer for Instructors and Researchers
• The many ecotones of the Columbia Gorge
• Preview of the 2012 Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Mount Everest and the limits of play
• If your loners are truly loners they won’t punish, and cooperation thrives even in the presence of antisocial punishment
• Perhaps nestedness is just an artifact of ecological opportunity (and not stability)
• Steven Pinker makes it clear that he is not a “group selectionist”
• Are the population dynamics of Dupont’s lark dictated by multilevel selective pressures?
• Understanding the role of the Templeton Foundation in funding evolutionary biology research
• Scientific American “Why We Help”
• “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” exhibit at the American Museum on Natural History
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First “examples” matrices
• Evolution 2010 (Overall Impressions)
• Evolution 2010 Day 3 (June 27th)
• Consilience
• Moving away from textbooks
• Understanding biome-level response to climate change
• Crade-to-Cradle
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – “Big Models” Special Session
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday): Afternoon sessions
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – Mutualistic Networks Symposium
• ESA 2009 Meeting Day #2 (Monday)
• ESA 2009 Day #1 (Sunday)
• Changing and not changing the way we use our agricultural land
• Quantitative Sustainability and the practice of Life Cycle Analysis
• Patternicity and that jerk on the cell phone
• Human Adaptation and Happiness
• Common Ground Symposium at Columbia University
• An Introduction

A Minor Post (535)

• How will the COVID-19 crisis affect action on climate change?
• Core of Me short video
• Alexandra Walling illuminates the mutual aid between evolutionary biologists and Jeffrey Epstein
• I will be participating in the 2019 NCEP Teaching & Learning Studio
• SSE tells HHS to acknowledge sex and gender diversity
• A cool (new-ish) IPD game theory simulator!
• Can mathematics save us from partisan Gerrymandering?
• YES, microplastics end up in our guts. Now the question is from where? And to what effect?
• When it comes to considering sex and gender, don’t forget sex determination
• Break not the ungulate culture of migration
• How renewable power sources grow more trees
• Australia’s a hot spot for climate change politics, climate change science, and climate change suffering
• Humans arrive, other mammals shrink
• Scientific American drops special issue on “Science of Being Human”
• Don’t blame people for being obese (blame their neighborhood)
• Mom: “Eat my sh*t and then help your younger siblings”
• Mom leaves, offspring get buff and work together
• Wildfires driven more by lowered precipitation than elevated temperatures or reduced snowpack
• Are corals riding ocean currents to exert climate change dominance over macroalgae?
• We aren’t the only gardeners on Madgascar
• Meta-analysis suggests that pesticides impair bee memory and learning
• No-till has some big no-catastrophic-climate-change potential
• All it takes to get a little specialized is a small increase in group size…
• What might we discover in the ocean twilight zone?
• Different hominin species not so species-like it seems
• Parasites better watch out for parasites!
• Model suggests that warming climate will catalyze greater insect-pest crop losses
• Is it possible that Trump’s science-adviser is a stealth climate-change accepter?
• Is sexualization of women driven by the structure of our economy?
• Both primates have their own uses for the same land
• Can a realistically-parameterized model tell us why our brains are so big?
• Alan Rabinowitz, 1953-2018
• PBS’ Deep Look on mole crabs
• PBS’ Deep Look on Firefly communication and deception
• Why Artists & Designers need Scientists: Exhibit A
• Deep Look on nutrient transport by salmon
• “Mount H-Index”: I never made it to base camp, and I have still had some great adventures
• Who was the first to catalog color? Hint: it wasn’t designers!
• Fantastic piece on nature/nurture by Patrick F. Clarkin in TVOL
• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• BLUE WEEK 2017 comes to Pratt Institute
• The argument against editing students’ drafts of written work
• Pratt News features short piece on Dr. Roland Kays’s campus visit
• I am honored to be part of Moral Sense III
• Annual Horses on campus event to take place on April 12th
• Pratt Institute launches Pratt Shows dedicated website
• Stunning archaeological find shocks the Pratt Photography Department
• Green Week 2017 opens at Pratt Institute
• Support the mighty Bombardier Beetle’s quest to have its genome sequenced!
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• Like boats & science?… this might be the artist’s residency for you!
• Science and art in dialogue: Pratt Manhattan Gallery hosts Dr. Rachael Winfree
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Hedgehogs, Raccoons, and Urbanite Biophilia
• NPR features Christopher Boehm on the love-hate relationship we have people in power
• Another great Skeptoid episode, this one on race
• Skeptoid podcast on Colony Collapse Disorder
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• 2016 Sustainability Summit live on Pratt’s Video Site
• Concerned about NYC’s air quality? Here’s a quick page to check…
• Want to know where NYC’s water supply stands? There’s a DEP page for that!
• Maybe human impacts aren’t so dramatic (when experienced from the geologic time scale)
• The question is how — not whether — students use electronic devices in the classroom
• Arming the Donkeys on kids, parenting, and Burning Man
• An interesting model for ditching the deadline
• Pratt students make the potential trip to Mars better designed
• Biophotovoltaics: a promising design innovation, or a great example of lack of quantitative design?
• A potentially interesting Evolution of Play documentary
• You can check out my first Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk (at St. Francis College) on YouTube
• Where’s the world’s biggest solar-electric power station going to be located?
• It’s good to remember how fast things change, culturally & biologically
• What can be made by mimicking biological “assemblies”?
• Students succeed in convincing the Pratt Board of Trustees to divest from fossil fuels
• Like to forage for mushrooms? Beware the Amanita!
• What’s the meaning of professorial fashion?
• Art in the Lab hosts Brain Awareness Week event on March 16th, 2016
• “This is the Nature of Cities” podcast on urban bees and civic ecology
• “Science: A Candle in the Dark” podcast on Urban Ecology
• “In Defense of Plants” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Dan Ariely’s “Arming the Donkeys” podcast
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the return of five-lined skinks
• Announcing “Eco 101”, a series of blog posts on the basics of ecology
• Why are architects required to take a course focused on ecology and environmental science?
• Emerging Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution releases roadmap document
• An eye is not an eye is not an eye
• Food is personal, sometimes ethical, but rarely political
• How do we know when people are actually happy?
• Understanding [culture + multilevel selection] = potential for Sustainability
• Injury intuition confirmation bias? Farce article goes really viral
• Would a “labor economy” lead to different outcomes than the “capital economy”?
• Clever study shows how cooperative bacteria sanction — and therefore exclude — cheaters
• Can understanding cooperation lead to higher-yield crops?
• How the built environment influences our ability to sustain personal and environmental commitments
• Personalized DNA tests likely to provide further evidence of human inter-connectedness
• What deficiencies in sound perception reveal about how we perceive sound
• To be an effective critical theorist of science, it helps to understand science
• Do we need to have a kinder, gentler one-child policy in Western industrial countries?
• Are technological optimists too optimistic about technological sustainability?
• Primates — but not their rodent relatives — can infer the effects of other individuals on resource availability
• Higher education teaching loads are about economics, not valuing teaching
• Jeremy Yoder on contemporary selection for increased human height
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• Maybe infants don’t really care who helps and who hinders after all…
• The problem with same sex attraction “for the good of the species”
• Fascinating and clever study of how personal contact norms vary by relationship
• Jonathan Haidt on the business advantage of being ethical
• That beard and deep voice may be to put him in his place, not attract her
• What’s the evolved function of curiosity?
• Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
• China shifts a failed cultural policy designed to stabilize population
• Open Book Publishers, an alternative model to academic presses
• Major masts made by multiplicative modification
• Group phenotypic composition: implications for individuals and their groups
• Does the rapid spread of a culture of over-exploitation intensify our impact on wild food sources?
• Are parasites really ecologically necessary?
• Shark attacks are down, but you still have to make good decisions out there on the ocean
• While we vacuum the seas, we may as well clean them of debris…
• Cargo ships a major source of NOx emissions
• The prickly (and largely unknown) sex life of bats
• Why the “just burn it all” approach to ending fossil fuel dependence does not work
• Mist net photographs as art?
• Charismatic megafauna offer protection to their less appealing heterospecifics
• Urbanization is not urbanization: density, not size, drives sustainability
• David Sloan Wilson on how Jeff Bezos don’t know squat about chickens (or evolution!)
• Does Bayesian bias aid us in making adaptive distorted self-assessments?
• W.W. Norton’s new InQuizitive partner to the Bergstrom and Dugatkin Evolution textbook
• Malcolm Gladwell on the social contagion of mass shootings
• Without sustainability in our diets, we won’t be sustainable
• Is technological evolution “de-agglomerating” cultural innovation?
• ECOmotion Studios on Huffaker’s crazy experiments to make prey and predators coexist
• ECOmotion Studios on Simberloff & Wilson’s island biogeography experiments
• ECOmotion Studios on Hairston Smith Slobodkin and why the earth is green
• EcoMotion studios celebrates Robert Paine’s Pisaster experiments
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on synanthropes and urban island castaways
• Like-with-like assortment plus exponential fitness increases cooperation, even under weak selection
• Should we compromise with nations that hunt whales?
• New report on drug resistance highlights the tragedy of our antibiotics commons
• Open Tree of Life allows experts and novices alike to explore “the” phylogeny
• Do creative people have “messy minds”?
• Does the ability to accumulate wealth make us value the future more?
• Are big corporate polluters trying to “artwash” their image?
• Formation of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution has the potential to catalyze research into how culture evolves
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the ubiquitous critters we don’t notice
• When it comes to sex, we are consumately proximate
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• Evolution 2016 meeting will feature evolution-themed art exhibit
• A chance to learn how an understanding of empathy can inform design
• Darwin in social context? Ric Brown’s fascinating survey of some important contemporaries
• Asymmetrical interaction best explained by superrational rather than rational strategy
• Our culture is special, but not especially uncommon
• Can good design make highways less of a problem?
• Have we outgrown the scale of cooperation supported by the Big Gods of Big Religion?
• The most fundamental way in which culture pushes against biology
• Rule number one of cooperative bacterial warfare? Be in the majority.
• Resources for writing a popular science book (and particularly a proposal)
• Is there any way to get students to come to class on time?
• Music, the cortisone balm?
• Should altruism have an effect on your final exam score?
• Are there better ways of using course evaluations?
• Carrying capacity — but not growth rate — varies with habitat quality (at least for moose)
• Go mutualistic or go home?
• Would killing my final exam make my class more memorable?
• Explaining the evolutionary explanation for handedness
• So much for the big-brained city bird theory?
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on big animals in big cities
• Rivers, Lakes, Seas, and Environmental Justice
• Pedagogical modeling in the higher education classroom
• Urban tree power
• Sadly, the Population Bombers (mostly) still don’t get it
• Court Ruling in the Netherlands may point the way to cracking the climate compliance conundrum
• Zoonosis, Ebola, and the Elusive Reservoir Host
• A niche with the masses?
• Can we resolve the ‘group selection debate’ by focusing on human cooperation?
• NYC Solar Map: a powerful tool for transformation to a solar future
• Tenured and mostly a teacher? I think that is already happening, whether or not we admit it.
• Do our students only respond to high-stakes testing?
• Guerrilla Science at Figment Art Festival 2015
• Is the threat of regulation enough to incentivize cooperation from nitrogen polluters?
• In the end, climate compromise comes down to writing and editing
• Grass on a Pedestal
• The costly nature of wind pollination
• New article in Science provides a comprehensive overview and update on Yellowstone National Park
• This site tops 75K page views
• On the verge of 400 ppm Carbon Dioxide: a symbolic threshold
• PCB Bioaccumulation and Polar Bear Penises
• The New Theme is nearly permanent
• Scientific American down on memorization
• Back to the old theme
• Water, Alfalfa, China, and a modern Tragedy of the Commons
• New theme in development for this site
• Ben Knight’s “Phyletic gradualism / Punctuated equilibrium”
• A nice synopsis of some reasons for laughter
• This site is now hosted by A Small Orange
• Do cancer cells play cooperate in the Prisoner’s Dilemma?
• The WmD Project has a logo
• Recommendations for creating a more student-centered classroom
• Evolution 2014: Synthesis centers can serve as incubators if they buffer researchers from the risk of failure
• Evolution 2014: Want to teach both sides? Have your students deconstruct creationist propaganda!
• Evolution 2014: EvoGrader will take the grading out of assessing student learning outcomes
• Evolution 2014: A clever way to see if creationist students understand evolutionary concepts
• Evolution 2014: The Evolution Film Festival was on fire!
• Evolution 2014: Could the right symbionts provide protection from chytrid infection to amphibians?
• Evolution 2014: Are island mutualist communities more likely to be nested because they are inherently more unstable?
• Evolution 2014: Is thyme a facultative mutualist with leguminous plants?
• Evolution 2014: Lemurs display huge diet diversity, and their gut microbes track this diversity
• Evolution 2014: Aphids protect themselves from parasitoids by harboring a bacteria whose viral parasite is toxic
• Evolution 2014: Evolution of cooperation in the high school classroom? You bet!
• Evolution 2014: NSF RCN-UBE program a great way to fund collaborative educational efforts
• Evolution 2014: Cooperative data collection is more meaningful than individual data collection
• Evolution 2014: Students can watch fly populations evolve in a matter of weeks
• Evolution 2014: Darwin’s “Backyard Beagle”
• Hawaiian crickets converge on the same solution to eavesdropping parasites
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• John Oliver holds first “balanced” climate debate on television
• Cath Dennis publishes non-computerized classroom adaptation of Axelrod’s iPD Tournament
• Apparently I should stop holding my breath for the Google Translate “dolphin” module
• Is “nest parasitism” really “nest mutualism”?
• 0.5% to 3%: Do we now have a better sense of what makes people smart?
• David Haig suggests that babies cry at night to prevent siblings
• Donald Trump saves CitiBike, proving that selfishness and cooperation are no longer opposed
• Pledge, Petition, Protect! All at Green Week 2014!
• Cognitive Ethology and Cat Companionship
• Interesting numbers on the sustainability (or lack thereof) of the aviation industry
• If sloths endure costs to maintain closed-loop agricultural systems, why can’t we?
• Do we need to delete to keep the web sustainable?
• TurnUp seeks to turn excess art materials into treasure, not trash
• String Theory: should we care?
• Okay, I admit it: I am a bit of a Neanderthal
• Model evidence that third party punishment only makes sense in tight-knit groups
• How understanding social evolution might help treat cancer
• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• Was Teilhard de Chardin the real inventor of an evolutionary approach to culture?
• Understanding the cascading effect of carnivore loss… before we lose all the carnivores
• Why socially-progressive scientists should not make bets…
• Cod gone on Cape Cod
• Concentrated factory farming of livestock massively alters the phosphorus cycle
• New edited volume joins the growing collection of literature dedicated to how cooperation evolves
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• In bird reproduction, parasitism and cooperation coevolve
• Curiosity and culturomics
• Are MOOCs just the clunky starting place for a more evolved form of new teaching?
• CNN tackles climate change by explaining public goods games!
• Now legal, Northern California’s pot farms join the rest of agriculture in impacting water supply
• Money Talking about Janet Yellen and multilevel selection
• Nice infographic on global and domestic food waste
• Can you replicate the collective adaptive value of religion without god?
• Would a different term make us better appreciate ecosystem services?
• Caterpillars weaponize nicotine
• I will participate in a roundtable discussion on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
• New fossil finds provide unique insight into the variation found in “Man the Hunted”
• Writing and record-keeping as important tools in the evolution of large-scale human cooperation
• “Brainchildren” — another way to conceptualize our devotion to cultural fitness
• Are MOOCs and the arts incompatible?
• Does self organization of social networks foster cooperation in the face of cheating?
• New research suggests that chimpanzees understand that cooperation produces benefits
• Microbes may surf their way to successful cooperation
• Open Access publishing and “peer review” fail the test of a well-designed hoax
• What the move towards a more sustainable Pratt looks like…
• Should we emulate the cooperative and conservative habits of the sloth?
• Recognizing the difference between what the big and small educational institutions offer
• An anecdote that illustrates the tremendous power of human network reciprocity
• Additional evidence that obesity may be due to environment, not just habits
• A tour of your diverse microbiome, and the things that might deplete that diversity
• With all we know, we still know too little to reliably re-engineer ecosystems
• More press for paper that de-bunks the zero determinant superiority
• New evidence of whooping crane culture on the rebound
• Ethnocentric cooperation dominates humanitarian cooperation in the computer… so why does humanitarianism persist?
• Schadenfreude as an instinct born of being a social, hierarchical animal
• Cooperative child-rearing pays dividends for ruffed lemurs, irrespective of kinship
• National Geographic “The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion”
• Think the Milgram Experiments tell us something definitive about human nature? Think again!
• Sarah Coakley on the connection between theology and evolutionary theory
• Zero determinant strategy is just another short-term adaptation
• Mammal monogamy still a mystery, but maybe more than a numbers game
• Is this site good enough to clone?
• Sketching as a way of seeing animal anatomy
• Isabella Rossellini tackles motherhood without human pretense
• New theory explaining the prevalence of homosexuality focuses on epigenetics
• Ever wonder about the swimming pattern of sperm?
• The potential for human evolution has increased along with the population size of our species
• Great NPR piece on how simple it would be for us to reduce carbon emissions
• Useful guides for writing good pseudocode
• The benefits of a maintaining a relatively small in-group
• Pratt Professor Ágnes Mócsy releases “Smashing Matters” short film
• NPR piece suggests that economics are pushing us towards nutrient recycling
• A spatial version of the Traveler’s Dilemma allows cooperation to persist
• Just in case you missed it the first ten times: E.O. Wilson likes group selection, Jerry Coyne does not
• Allen MacNeill predicts resolution of Ev-Coop debates
• Martin Nowak to lecture on the compatibility of god and the evolutionary process
• Understanding kin selection and reciprocity when strategies are culturally propagated
• “Earth Hour” seeks to re-focus our attention on all the earth provides
• Seth Horowitz on our perception of sound
• Forward on Climate Rally seeks to shift the national dialogue on anthropogenic climate change
• Quantifying the climate value of that 40-acre woodlot
• Up-Goer Five text editor challenges you to make accessible explanations
• Green port policies yield big decreases in the ecological footprint of shipping
• As the nature of university-level teaching changes, should we re-assess the credit hour?
• Dog license dataset opens up huge potential for understanding the dog-human mutualism
• Brief NYT article on empathy in children
• Production on marginal lands can meet only 25% of our biofuel mandates
• Roberts Publishing releases an iPad version of their majors Evolution textbook
• Montreal art installation rewards cooperative play with musical novelty
• If your “free will” is questionable, feel free to exercise your “free won’t”
• Do our brains require endurance activity in order to function?
• Barash not so enlightening on the paradox of human homosexuality
• Multiple Intelligences theory gets some neuroscientific support
• Charlotte Douglas International Airport employs worms to close the loop on airport waste
• Freeman Dyson wins the contest, and then says the contest is stupid
• Pratt Institute opens search for new full-time faculty member in the Math and Science Department
• Fracking study retracted after the discovery of a massive conflict of interest
• G. Kim Blank on making writing work better by eliminating the term paper
• NPR provides a quick overview of the human drive to reciprocate
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• New evidence that economic cooperation existed between Vikings and Inuit
• National Geographic feature on penguin propulsion
• Does American faith in genetic determinism limit the achievement of our students?
• Further evidence that Hamilton was wrong about eusocial insects
• Making the formation of social networks more realistic also makes them more cooperative
• Envirolutions students release Trash Tetris video to promote recycling bin launch
• Slate article explores the big brain, big society connection
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• Megan Frederickson shares the wonder of ant cooperation with Toronto Library patrons
• Chronicle of Higher Education feature explores the question of why more women do not succeed in science
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• Michael Ruse on James Lovelock’s Gaia of 2012
• Ready for eugenics 2.0?
• International Symposium honors the work of Lynn Margulis
• On becoming a psychopath
• Rogue iron fertilization? Things have gotten weird!
• Freeman Dyson calls the Prisoner’s Dilemma “an amusing toy”
• New PNAS special issue explores the developmental effects of early social environment
• Rob Nixon on Rachel Carson’s prescience
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• Can neuroeconomics help economics become a real science?
• Barry Commoner, pioneering scientist and environmentalist, is dead at 95
• Enforcing norms may be for personal gain, not to maintain social order (at least amongst Santa Barbara undergraduates)
• Think that the DNA transfer is only from parents to offspring? Think again!
• Some conservatives actually see the public health and economic dilemmas posed by greenhouse gas emissions
• Can proper education allow reputation to foster action on climate change?
• Lack of complete transparency presents an obstacle but not a block to cooperation
• Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, cannot triangulate punishment
• What’s ironic is that the creationists do not realize that we evolutionists might be trying to understand their success
• Agent-based modeling instead of game theory: I agree!
• Punishment, properly rewarded, can promote cooperation without corruption
• Want a good gauge of how much humans pollute waterways? Just measure for caffeine!
• The humble Mistletoe turns out to be a probable keystone species
• Climate and Clean Air Coalition unites air pollution concerns
• Reductions in fertilizer use are now worth carbon credits
• Does anthropogenic change make natives into invaders?
• Are the Sentinelese the last untouched hunter-gatherer culture?
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• Despite great press for Dyson, the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is still not the solution to human cooperation
• Rachel Carson still under attack for bringing her values to bear on her science
• Rebranding global warming as a health threat
• Bacterial societies defy selfish gene predictions
• “School of Life” acknowledges the values in religion worth preserving
• Open and fluid, science even requires constant revision of logos
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• Would online data repositories solve the problem of scientific fraud?
• Greece’s massive recession is making it more ecologically sustainable
• The Guardian profiles E.O. Wilson
• “Adaptive” approach to climate change puts faith in resilience thinking
• Infographic signs on the road to game theory understanding
• Steve C. Walker on optimistic but reasonable expectations for mathematics
• Biocreativity blog explores the interaction between biology and art
• Can crocheting help save corals? Can we learn something about developmental genetics in the process?
• Great NPR piece on NYC taxis highlights the importance of testing assumptions with modeling
• Mark Bittman on the ecological imperative of eating less meat
• New York Times article on zoonotic disease risks
• Climate change makes mountaineering more risky
• New evidence for gene-culture evolution in Native Americans
• Australopithecus sediba fossils reveal a more apelike diet
• Drift may be not be specific to genetic systems
• When any behavior can be modeled, real-world constraint is critical
• Experimental study of cooperation and population structure calls into question the importance of heterogeneity
• Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics hosts conference on the role of cooperation in major evolutionary transitions
• Additional theoretical study insists that population structure does promote cooperation
• I am finally diving into NetLogo!
• Acid rain policy changes yield slow but real ecological results
• 7000 year old fossil human DNA discovered
• New fossil find pushes back the origin of bilaterally symmetrical multicellular organisms
• Matthew Zimmerman on how international relations views the evolution of groups
• High-throughput screening accelerates the rate at which evolved plant chemicals can be turned into medicine
• Changing rice from C3 to C4 in order to feed our growing population
• Fences exclude invasive predators, give aid to threatened Hawaiian birds
• North American federal governments seek to defund environmental and ecological science
• Macroecologists weigh in on how well sustainability science considers ecological limits
• Yes, you can now believe that fairy circles live…
• Larry Arnhart on Singer, Bowles, and Gintis and Darwinian libertarianism
• David Sloan Wilson on narratives of regulation
• A victory for collective action and national cooperation
• Australopithecus sediba was a C3 muncher (so say the teeth)
• High tech ad hoc fixes face off against good old-fashioned prevention in the Baltic Sea
• Leaving with empty hands, should Rio+20 participants nonetheless leave with a sense of optimism?
• Antibiotic overuse: a porcine tragedy of the commons
• Identifying the genes that gave dolphins their big brains
• The ecological impacts of the BP-Deepwater Horizon oil spill quantified
• Condors, hunters, and the National Rifle Association
• Jerry Coyne refutes the E.O. Wilson NYT piece
• E.O. Wilson on the biological origins of sin and virtue
• A new salvo in the punishment wars: if everyone can punish, defectors triumph
• Andrew Colman on “spontaneous similarity discrimination”
• Call it “ethnocentrism” or the “green beard effect”, “tags” assist cooperation
• Sometimes our simulations have more to tell than we first see
• A final solution to the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma?
• Robert Krulwich on the value of telling stories about science
• On Being features David Sloan Wilson
• Daniel Dennett on Darwin and Turing’s “strange inversion of reasoning”
• Macroevolutionary change: do successful lineages have “evolvability” or “survivability”?
• Evolution may be too slow: British Columbia begins assisted migration of forests
• Extensive long-term studies document the effect of biodiversity in ecosystem productivity
• Diving bell spider fashions its own scuba tanks
• Wasps can recognize each other, by face
• National Geographic goes looking for heat-loving bacteria in a very cold place
• National Geographic’s “If They Could Only Talk” considers Easter Island’s many mysteries
• National Geographic feature on “Vanishing Languages”
• Shark species may be more cryptic than previously understood
• Peter Turchin on Steven Pinker’s “Grand Deception” hypotheses
• New study published in Ecology Letters quantifies the effects of intensive agriculture on large-scale biodiversity
• Once again David Sloan Wilson defends himself using facts
• Once again Jerry Coyne goes ad hominem to defend evolutionary orthodoxy
• Bird study suggests that multilevel selection theory is necessary to understand population dynamics
• Is sexual practice coevolving with our cultural technologies?
• Most people (at least in Spain) recognize the value of ecosystem services, but their valuation varies
• Could differential symbiosis be a mechanism by which genetically-variable hosts speciate?
• Would you like a few red-listed species with that shrimp cocktail sir?
• New assessment of scientific reasoning skills suggests that students need better inquiry-based education
• Apparently you need to know something about rare granite erosion to understand the evolution of multicellularity
• Should conservation scientists also be advocates for particular policies?
• Music evolves (culturally!) from noise to song under the influence of human selection
• Nice summary piece on the state of research into human nature and morality by Agustín Fuentes
• Turtles caught in the act provide new paleontological insights
• Tim Birkenhead on anthropomorphism and animal emotion
• David Barash illuminates the “EvoPolitics” of Darwin’s time
• A pharma-agricultural tragedy of the commons?
• Are there genetic markers for ethnicity?
• Great Michael Ruse piece on the politics of resisting religious encroachment on evolutionary biology
• Ted Kaczynski as a scholar of resistance to technology
• Preschoolers cooperatively rock chimps in puzzle tournament
• Prominent evolutionary biologists weigh in on whether humans can evolve into a ‘superorganism’
• Is this what free-market conservation looks like?
• Mutualistic fungus transfers nitrogen from parasitized insects to its plant host
• North Carolina legislators enact strict law limiting the rate of natural change
• A competitive nominee in the “weirdest YouTube video about a theoretical biology paper” category
• Gerald Carter produces an informative video on cooperation in vampire bats
• Familiarity breeds… mutual aid (at least in some birds)
• Interesting reports from the Consilience Conference
• Jason Collins questions the utility-to-fitness conversion
• Do you need cooperation in your model to explain why there are more right-handed people?
• Once your subject becomes a continuing education class…
• July issue of Scientific American will feature a cover story on the evolution of cooperation
• Who is the bigger bioterrorist, man or nature?
• There is no doubt that there are conservation trade-offs associated with the proliferation of wind power
• Is a comic movie about getting a Ph.D. revealing of some scientific tragedies?
• Self-castration sometimes turns out to be good for reproductive success
• Kandyan dwarf toad removes itself from the IUCN Red List
• Longer telomeres imparted by older fathers may forestall senescence
• Brian Czech warns ecologists against drinking the “sustainable growth Koolaid”
• Honey bees harbor a remarkably diverse community of mutualistic gut microbes
• Lyme disease extensification may have more to do with foxes than deer
• Peacocks communicate via the (ultra)sounds they make with their feathers
• Is Alzheimer’s disease caused by prion proliferation?
• PBS short profiles Pratt Institute
• Our brains are too smart to be tricked: diet sodas just make your body crave more calories
• In case you were a skeptic: bears can count
• Freaked out grasshoppers just do not contribute to decomposition in the same manner as their more relaxed brethren
• Surprisingly, rugby can be used to understand honest signaling
• Aquatic food chains have gotten longer and less diverse over evolutionary time
• Digital organisms yield new insights into the effects of extinction on long-term phylogenetic patterns of evolution
• Is human genetic research being hampered by a failure to share data?
• Mesocosm experiment considers the effects of human modification of community structure
• New study on birds uses remote tracking to provide detailed behavioral data
• Big felines have lots of commensal fans
• A comparison of behaviorally-based animal diseases reminds us of the kingdom in which we belong
• Science Magazine outlines the big scientific issues at Rio+20
• New comprehensive data synthesis favors a pluralistic explanation for Eurasian mammoth extinction
• The Australian Government blocks coal mine to protect the Great Barrier Reef
• Now if you could only keep your cytosine methylated you might live forever
• Bonobo sequence establishes that humans are equally but dissimilarly related to our chimpanzee relatives
• Elinor Ostrom, pioneering social scientist and scholar of cooperation, is dead at 78
• “EvoLudo” site provides tutorials on evolutionary games related to cooperation
• “Evolution and Games” site provides tutorials on cooperation theory
• E-print Network provides searchable access to the primary scientific literature
• Can “muppet theory” help explain behavioral heterogeneity in human social groups?
• Vampire bats: the ideal organism for studying cooperation?
• NY Times provides perspective on E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• Richard Dawkins on E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• David Sloan Wilson on Richard Dawkins on E.O. Wilson
• Does climate change have the potential to reduce the stabilizing effects of biodiversity?
• Bruce B. Henderson on the unappreciated importance of “consumatory scholarship”
• On the Media takes on the problem of scientific integrity in scientific journals and the popular media
• Don’t mistake having a better map for knowing where you are: new technology for sequencing fetal DNA will not lead to serious trait selection
• Joseph E. Stiglitz discusses the economically destabilizing impact of rent-seeking
• There are plenty of organs out there: more altruism would end the social dilemma of who gets available organs
• More flatfish transitional fossils found
• Human limits extended one step further as wingsuit diver lands without a parachute
• Will invasive truffles become the bane of European epicures?
• Larry Arnhart reviews E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• David Sloan Wilson differentiates “Evolutionary Religious Studies” from “The New Atheism”
• Can environmentalists and the religious faithful work together to preserve creation?
• Are the most lucrative components of the financial sector parasites on the larger economy?
• How fast do anthropogenic impacts get amplified up the food chain? Ask a bluefin!
• Peter Turchin on the “Dark Side of Cultural Evolution”
• Social Evolution Forum takes on role of social networking in human cooperation
• {Canis lupus familiaris + Homo sapiens} versus Homo neanderthalenthis?
• Is the origin of all life the gyre?
• S.E. Gould takes on sloppy use of the selfish gene metaphor
• UCS “Cooler Smarter” footprint calculator promotes lower carbon behaviors
• The Union of Concerned Scientists illuminates Monsanto’s role in maintaining unsustainable agricultural practices
• Paulinella chromatophora’s photosynthetic engine blurs the line between endosymbiont and organelle
• Alife XIII conference explores the simulation of artificial life
• EcoHealth sponsors art competition
• Why don’t other animals make better use of punishment?
• An argument for better Frankensteins (and thus more prudent use of technology)
• Conservation Biology that acknowledges that we can never go back
• Can cod come back?
• I knew that dog was watching me: Jennifer Verdolin confirms my worst fears
• If you don’t think that culture can make us do maladaptive things, check out “trepanning”
• Richard Sennett’s “Together” explores the history of cooperative rituals
• National Academies Press releases proceedings for “Cooperation and Conflict” colloquium
• “Open Yale” course provides the fundamentals of Game Theory for free
• Is the sustainability movement too eco-centric?
• John Horgan reviews Robert Trivers’ “The Folly of Fools”
• James K. Galbraith makes the connection between debt policy and social stability
• BBC covers the up side of the North Pacific plastic “garbage patch”
• Short interview with Mark Pagel in The Guardian
• Painting called “Endosymbiosis” honors the legacy of Lynn Margulis
• Olivia Judson reviews Mark Pagel’s “Wired for Culture”
• Are dolphins on their way to domesticating humans?
• I am not the only one who likes to narrowly interpret creative works through my scientific lens
• What kind of in-group does Facebook represent?
• Steven Railsback and Volker Grimm offer new introduction to the process of agent- and individual-based modeling
• Joel E. Cohen on the 7 billion human mark
• A fabulous article on the collective efforts that created the World Wide Web and the corporate efforts to destroy it
• National Geographic “Fatal Attraction”

Activism (25)

• Eco-Performance Lab during Pratt’s 2019 Green Week the first step of “To the Core of Me”
• Alan Rabinowitz, 1953-2018
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Green Week 2017 opens at Pratt Institute
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• An inspiring summit, but big challenges at home and afar…
• Sustainability Summit at Pratt Institute featuring Josh Fox
• America Society of Primatologists condemns H. A. and Margret Rey, calls for Curious George boycott
• Alternative music legend Morrissey agrees to adopt 2 million feral cats in win-win for felines, Australian native fauna
• Students succeed in convincing the Pratt Board of Trustees to divest from fossil fuels
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• Crucial climate talks in Paris take place in a socially repressive environment
• Do we need to have a kinder, gentler one-child policy in Western industrial countries?
• Are technological optimists too optimistic about technological sustainability?
• Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
• Should we compromise with nations that hunt whales?
• Are big corporate polluters trying to “artwash” their image?
• Court Ruling in the Netherlands may point the way to cracking the climate compliance conundrum
• Review of What We Made by Tom Finkelpearl
• Pledge, Petition, Protect! All at Green Week 2014!
• “Earth Hour” seeks to re-focus our attention on all the earth provides
• Ted Kaczynski as a scholar of resistance to technology
• UCS “Cooler Smarter” footprint calculator promotes lower carbon behaviors
• The Union of Concerned Scientists illuminates Monsanto’s role in maintaining unsustainable agricultural practices

Adaptation (68)

• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2019)
• My entry on the evolution of play will be added to the massive Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science
• PBS’ Deep Look on mole crabs
• PBS’ Deep Look on Firefly communication and deception
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2017)
• Why Artists & Designers need Scientists: Exhibit A
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Fantastic piece on nature/nurture by Patrick F. Clarkin in TVOL
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2017)
• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• Support the mighty Bombardier Beetle’s quest to have its genome sequenced!
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2016)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2016)
• It’s good to remember how fast things change, culturally & biologically
• What can be made by mimicking biological “assemblies”?
• Like to forage for mushrooms? Beware the Amanita!
• I visit Pratt’s Poetics Lab focused on play
• An eye is not an eye is not an eye
• It was an honor to talk to St. Francis College!
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• That beard and deep voice may be to put him in his place, not attract her
• Major masts made by multiplicative modification
• Group phenotypic composition: implications for individuals and their groups
• New report on drug resistance highlights the tragedy of our antibiotics commons
• Does the ability to accumulate wealth make us value the future more?
• Our culture is special, but not especially uncommon
• WmD Episode #00003 has been released
• Explaining the evolutionary explanation for handedness
• So much for the big-brained city bird theory?
• Evolution beyond adaptation: a critical step for evolutionary theory
• The costly nature of wind pollination
• Our paper on a super-rational solution to the tragedy of the commons published in Scientific Reports
• Ben Knight’s “Phyletic gradualism / Punctuated equilibrium”
• Do cancer cells play cooperate in the Prisoner’s Dilemma?
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Hawaiian crickets converge on the same solution to eavesdropping parasites
• Apparently I should stop holding my breath for the Google Translate “dolphin” module
• Is “nest parasitism” really “nest mutualism”?
• 0.5% to 3%: Do we now have a better sense of what makes people smart?
• Cognitive Ethology and Cat Companionship
• If sloths endure costs to maintain closed-loop agricultural systems, why can’t we?
• String Theory: should we care?
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• Caterpillars weaponize nicotine
• Should we emulate the cooperative and conservative habits of the sloth?
• Zero determinant strategy is just another short-term adaptation
• Sketching as a way of seeing animal anatomy
• Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno
• Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
• Do our brains require endurance activity in order to function?
• Multiple Intelligences theory gets some neuroscientific support
• National Geographic feature on penguin propulsion
• Slate article explores the big brain, big society connection
• Megan Frederickson shares the wonder of ant cooperation with Toronto Library patrons
• New PNAS special issue explores the developmental effects of early social environment
• Think that the DNA transfer is only from parents to offspring? Think again!
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• Rachel Carson still under attack for bringing her values to bear on her science
• Bacterial societies defy selfish gene predictions
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• Daniel Dennett on Darwin and Turing’s “strange inversion of reasoning”
• Evolution may be too slow: British Columbia begins assisted migration of forests
• Diving bell spider fashions its own scuba tanks
• Wasps can recognize each other, by face
• National Geographic goes looking for heat-loving bacteria in a very cold place
• Peter Turchin on Steven Pinker’s “Grand Deception” hypotheses
• Steven Pinker makes it clear that he is not a “group selectionist”
• Tim Birkenhead on anthropomorphism and animal emotion
• Prominent evolutionary biologists weigh in on whether humans can evolve into a ‘superorganism’
• Peacocks communicate via the (ultra)sounds they make with their feathers
• “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” exhibit at the American Museum on Natural History
• In case you were a skeptic: bears can count
• Freaked out grasshoppers just do not contribute to decomposition in the same manner as their more relaxed brethren
• Peter Turchin on the “Dark Side of Cultural Evolution”
• BBC covers the up side of the North Pacific plastic “garbage patch”
• NPR drops dumb Bell Curve segment
• The beginning of sex as we know it
• Scientific American “Controlling the Brain with Light”
• Robert Trivers and colleagues on Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson’s “The evolution of eusociality”
• The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution
• Sourcing sources of selection
• Do you still think God is good?
• Understanding biome-level response to climate change
• National Geographic “Fatal Attraction”
• Human Adaptation and Happiness

Allometries (3)

• Can a realistically-parameterized model tell us why our brains are so big?
• Lev Ginzburg Fest: celebration of a “retirement”
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday): Afternoon sessions

Altruism (43)

• Professor Jensen’s Guide to Urban Cycling
• Dan Ariely’s “Arming the Donkeys” podcast
• Clever study shows how cooperative bacteria sanction — and therefore exclude — cheaters
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• Maybe infants don’t really care who helps and who hinders after all…
• Asymmetrical interaction best explained by superrational rather than rational strategy
• Have we outgrown the scale of cooperation supported by the Big Gods of Big Religion?
• Should altruism have an effect on your final exam score?
• How stupid professorial attitudes towards Wikipedia are making students less savvy
• E&E in A&D: The Armstrong Lie
• Our paper on a super-rational solution to the tragedy of the commons published in Scientific Reports
• Do humans form genetically similar social groups independent of kinship?
• Donald Trump saves CitiBike, proving that selfishness and cooperation are no longer opposed
• Model evidence that third party punishment only makes sense in tight-knit groups
• In bird reproduction, parasitism and cooperation coevolve
• My review of “Origins of Altruism and Cooperation” is published in QRB
• Think the Milgram Experiments tell us something definitive about human nature? Think again!
• Brief NYT article on empathy in children
• Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• On becoming a psychopath
• Freeman Dyson calls the Prisoner’s Dilemma “an amusing toy”
• What’s ironic is that the creationists do not realize that we evolutionists might be trying to understand their success
• Punishment, properly rewarded, can promote cooperation without corruption
• Despite great press for Dyson, the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is still not the solution to human cooperation
• Bacterial societies defy selfish gene predictions
• “School of Life” acknowledges the values in religion worth preserving
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• Matthew Zimmerman on how international relations views the evolution of groups
• If your loners are truly loners they won’t punish, and cooperation thrives even in the presence of antisocial punishment
• Peter Turchin on Steven Pinker’s “Grand Deception” hypotheses
• Gerald Carter produces an informative video on cooperation in vampire bats
• There are plenty of organs out there: more altruism would end the social dilemma of who gets available organs
• Is the European Union going rogue or playing altruist on airline emissions?
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• Howard Rheingold TED talk urges a global movement to study cooperation
• Costly signalling not so costly in the presence of comrades
• Rand and Nowak paper on antisocial punishment in public goods games
• Martin Nowak lecture on The Evolution of Cooperation at MIT
• “A Paradise Built in Hell” by Rebecca Solnit
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• Robert Trivers and colleagues on Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson’s “The evolution of eusociality”
• Human Adaptation and Happiness

Animal Domestication (9)

• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2017)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2016)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2016)
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• {Canis lupus familiaris + Homo sapiens} versus Homo neanderthalenthis?
• Aquaculture on Leonard Lopate
• National Geographic’s “Science of Dogs”
• The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution
• The Quest for the Perfect Hive

Anthropogenic Change (72)

• How will the COVID-19 crisis affect action on climate change?
• Core of Me short video
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2019)
• Eco-Performance Lab during Pratt’s 2019 Green Week the first step of “To the Core of Me”
• My newest STEAMplant collaboration is “To the Core of Me: A Hike Play”
• My interview with Ardis DeFreece has been published in SciArt Magazine
• YES, microplastics end up in our guts. Now the question is from where? And to what effect?
• How renewable power sources grow more trees
• Australia’s a hot spot for climate change politics, climate change science, and climate change suffering
• Humans arrive, other mammals shrink
• Wildfires driven more by lowered precipitation than elevated temperatures or reduced snowpack
• Are corals riding ocean currents to exert climate change dominance over macroalgae?
• Meta-analysis suggests that pesticides impair bee memory and learning
• No-till has some big no-catastrophic-climate-change potential
• What might we discover in the ocean twilight zone?
• Model suggests that warming climate will catalyze greater insect-pest crop losses
• Escape is a big risk in aquaculture
• Is it possible that Trump’s science-adviser is a stealth climate-change accepter?
• Both primates have their own uses for the same land
• Professor Jensen’s Guide to Urban Cycling
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2017)
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• BLUE WEEK 2017 comes to Pratt Institute
• Urban Transect Walks: helping your students see the overlap between ecological and social patterns
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2017)
• Republicans release climate change plan based on “Respiration Reduction”
• Green Week 2017 opens at Pratt Institute
• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• Science and art in dialogue: Pratt Manhattan Gallery hosts Dr. Rachael Winfree
• Skeptoid podcast on Colony Collapse Disorder
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2016)
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• 2016 Sustainability Summit live on Pratt’s Video Site
• Concerned about NYC’s air quality? Here’s a quick page to check…
• My ecological footprint for 2016-2017
• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• Sustainability Summit at Pratt Institute featuring Josh Fox
• Biophotovoltaics: a promising design innovation, or a great example of lack of quantitative design?
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2016)
• It’s good to remember how fast things change, culturally & biologically
• My ecological footprint for 2015-2016
• Alternative music legend Morrissey agrees to adopt 2 million feral cats in win-win for felines, Australian native fauna
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• Students succeed in convincing the Pratt Board of Trustees to divest from fossil fuels
• Like to forage for mushrooms? Beware the Amanita!
• I am honored to be visiting the Green Meadow Waldorf School as part of their week-long Sustainability workshop
• “This is the Nature of Cities” podcast on urban bees and civic ecology
• “Science: A Candle in the Dark” podcast on Urban Ecology
• “In Defense of Plants” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the return of five-lined skinks
• Food is personal, sometimes ethical, but rarely political
• Is New York City a “sustainable” metropolis?
• Crucial climate talks in Paris take place in a socially repressive environment
• Are technological optimists too optimistic about technological sustainability?
• Does the rapid spread of a culture of over-exploitation intensify our impact on wild food sources?
• Shark attacks are down, but you still have to make good decisions out there on the ocean
• While we vacuum the seas, we may as well clean them of debris…
• Cargo ships a major source of NOx emissions
• Why the “just burn it all” approach to ending fossil fuel dependence does not work
• Mist net photographs as art?
• Charismatic megafauna offer protection to their less appealing heterospecifics
• Urbanization is not urbanization: density, not size, drives sustainability
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• Without sustainability in our diets, we won’t be sustainable
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on synanthropes and urban island castaways
• Should we compromise with nations that hunt whales?
• Are big corporate polluters trying to “artwash” their image?
• Formation of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution has the potential to catalyze research into how culture evolves
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• Can good design make highways less of a problem?
• Carrying capacity — but not growth rate — varies with habitat quality (at least for moose)
• Go mutualistic or go home?
• So much for the big-brained city bird theory?
• Rivers, Lakes, Seas, and Environmental Justice
• Sadly, the Population Bombers (mostly) still don’t get it
• Court Ruling in the Netherlands may point the way to cracking the climate compliance conundrum
• Is the threat of regulation enough to incentivize cooperation from nitrogen polluters?
• In the end, climate compromise comes down to writing and editing
• Grass on a Pedestal
• New article in Science provides a comprehensive overview and update on Yellowstone National Park
• My ecological footprint for 2014-2015
• On the verge of 400 ppm Carbon Dioxide: a symbolic threshold
• PCB Bioaccumulation and Polar Bear Penises
• Water, Alfalfa, China, and a modern Tragedy of the Commons
• Evolution 2014: Could the right symbionts provide protection from chytrid infection to amphibians?
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• John Oliver holds first “balanced” climate debate on television
• Our review paper on Late Pleistocene Extinction Modeling published in QRB!
• There’s No Such Thing as Qualitative Sustainability
• New glacial maximum on Mount ARC provides definitive evidence that Pratt’s sustainability efforts are working
• Interesting numbers on the sustainability (or lack thereof) of the aviation industry
• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology
• Understanding the cascading effect of carnivore loss… before we lose all the carnivores
• Why socially-progressive scientists should not make bets…
• Cod gone on Cape Cod
• Concentrated factory farming of livestock massively alters the phosphorus cycle
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• CNN tackles climate change by explaining public goods games!
• Now legal, Northern California’s pot farms join the rest of agriculture in impacting water supply
• Nice infographic on global and domestic food waste
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• Would a different term make us better appreciate ecosystem services?
• With all we know, we still know too little to reliably re-engineer ecosystems
• New evidence of whooping crane culture on the rebound
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno
• Great NPR piece on how simple it would be for us to reduce carbon emissions
• NPR piece suggests that economics are pushing us towards nutrient recycling
• “Earth Hour” seeks to re-focus our attention on all the earth provides
• Forward on Climate Rally seeks to shift the national dialogue on anthropogenic climate change
• Quantifying the climate value of that 40-acre woodlot
• Production on marginal lands can meet only 25% of our biofuel mandates
• Fracking study retracted after the discovery of a massive conflict of interest
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• Michael Ruse on James Lovelock’s Gaia of 2012
• Rogue iron fertilization? Things have gotten weird!
• Rob Nixon on Rachel Carson’s prescience
• Barry Commoner, pioneering scientist and environmentalist, is dead at 95
• Some conservatives actually see the public health and economic dilemmas posed by greenhouse gas emissions
• Can proper education allow reputation to foster action on climate change?
• Want a good gauge of how much humans pollute waterways? Just measure for caffeine!
• Climate and Clean Air Coalition unites air pollution concerns
• Reductions in fertilizer use are now worth carbon credits
• Does anthropogenic change make natives into invaders?
• Are the Sentinelese the last untouched hunter-gatherer culture?
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• Rachel Carson still under attack for bringing her values to bear on her science
• Rebranding global warming as a health threat
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• “Adaptive” approach to climate change puts faith in resilience thinking
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• Preview of the 2012 Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Mark Bittman on the ecological imperative of eating less meat
• Climate change makes mountaineering more risky
• Acid rain policy changes yield slow but real ecological results
• High-throughput screening accelerates the rate at which evolved plant chemicals can be turned into medicine
• Fences exclude invasive predators, give aid to threatened Hawaiian birds
• The ecological impacts of the BP-Deepwater Horizon oil spill quantified
• Condors, hunters, and the National Rifle Association
• Evolution may be too slow: British Columbia begins assisted migration of forests
• Extensive long-term studies document the effect of biodiversity in ecosystem productivity
• New study published in Ecology Letters quantifies the effects of intensive agriculture on large-scale biodiversity
• Would you like a few red-listed species with that shrimp cocktail sir?
• North Carolina legislators enact strict law limiting the rate of natural change
• Scientific American “Why We Help”
• There is no doubt that there are conservation trade-offs associated with the proliferation of wind power
• Brian Czech warns ecologists against drinking the “sustainable growth Koolaid”
• The Australian Government blocks coal mine to protect the Great Barrier Reef
• Does climate change have the potential to reduce the stabilizing effects of biodiversity?
• Will invasive truffles become the bane of European epicures?
• How fast do anthropogenic impacts get amplified up the food chain? Ask a bluefin!
• Can cod come back?
• Molly H. Adams earns top honors from the Critical and Visual Studies program
• BBC covers the up side of the North Pacific plastic “garbage patch”
• Is the European Union going rogue or playing altruist on airline emissions?
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Hurricane Irene evacuation naysayers point out some fundamental human problems with understanding risk
• Saving Puffins, One Clip at a Time
• Using Ecological Footprints to Teach Sustainability
• Are Eco-labels an Effective Tool for Conservation?
• Official video of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010
• 2010 Convention on Biological Diversity and Ecosystem Services (Sorta)
• Asian Carp on NPR
• National Geographic “Wolf Wars”
• The Cove
• Steven Chillrud Visit to Pratt Institute
• Understanding biome-level response to climate change
• Changing and not changing the way we use our agricultural land

Aquaculture (1)

• Escape is a big risk in aquaculture

Archaeology (4)

• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• Stunning archaeological find shocks the Pratt Photography Department
• Formation of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution has the potential to catalyze research into how culture evolves
• New evidence that economic cooperation existed between Vikings and Inuit

Architecture (8)

• Don’t blame people for being obese (blame their neighborhood)
• Wildfires driven more by lowered precipitation than elevated temperatures or reduced snowpack
• Professor Jensen’s Guide to Urban Cycling
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Urban Transect Walks: helping your students see the overlap between ecological and social patterns
• Pratt Institute launches Pratt Shows dedicated website
• Concerned about NYC’s air quality? Here’s a quick page to check…
• Pratt students make the potential trip to Mars better designed
• It’s good to remember how fast things change, culturally & biologically
• What can be made by mimicking biological “assemblies”?
• “Science: A Candle in the Dark” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Why are architects required to take a course focused on ecology and environmental science?
• Urbanization is not urbanization: density, not size, drives sustainability
• Can good design make highways less of a problem?
• Celebrating Studios Days Spring 2015
• There’s No Such Thing as Qualitative Sustainability
• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology

Art & Design (32)

Articles (189)

• How will the COVID-19 crisis affect action on climate change?
• Humans arrive, other mammals shrink
• What might we discover in the ocean twilight zone?
• Can a realistically-parameterized model tell us why our brains are so big?
• Fantastic piece on nature/nurture by Patrick F. Clarkin in TVOL
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• An eye is not an eye is not an eye
• Food is personal, sometimes ethical, but rarely political
• How do we know when people are actually happy?
• Is New York City a “sustainable” metropolis?
• Understanding [culture + multilevel selection] = potential for Sustainability
• Injury intuition confirmation bias? Farce article goes really viral
• To be an effective critical theorist of science, it helps to understand science
• Are technological optimists too optimistic about technological sustainability?
• Primates — but not their rodent relatives — can infer the effects of other individuals on resource availability
• Higher education teaching loads are about economics, not valuing teaching
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• Maybe infants don’t really care who helps and who hinders after all…
• The problem with same sex attraction “for the good of the species”
• Fascinating and clever study of how personal contact norms vary by relationship
• That beard and deep voice may be to put him in his place, not attract her
• China shifts a failed cultural policy designed to stabilize population
• Major masts made by multiplicative modification
• Group phenotypic composition: implications for individuals and their groups
• Does the rapid spread of a culture of over-exploitation intensify our impact on wild food sources?
• Are parasites really ecologically necessary?
• Shark attacks are down, but you still have to make good decisions out there on the ocean
• While we vacuum the seas, we may as well clean them of debris…
• Cargo ships a major source of NOx emissions
• Why the “just burn it all” approach to ending fossil fuel dependence does not work
• Does Bayesian bias aid us in making adaptive distorted self-assessments?
• Like-with-like assortment plus exponential fitness increases cooperation, even under weak selection
• Should we compromise with nations that hunt whales?
• Open Tree of Life allows experts and novices alike to explore “the” phylogeny
• Does the ability to accumulate wealth make us value the future more?
• Are big corporate polluters trying to “artwash” their image?
• When it comes to sex, we are consumately proximate
• Rule number one of cooperative bacterial warfare? Be in the majority.
• Music, the cortisone balm?
• Should altruism have an effect on your final exam score?
• Carrying capacity — but not growth rate — varies with habitat quality (at least for moose)
• Go mutualistic or go home?
• So much for the big-brained city bird theory?
• Rivers, Lakes, Seas, and Environmental Justice
• Evolution beyond adaptation: a critical step for evolutionary theory
• Court Ruling in the Netherlands may point the way to cracking the climate compliance conundrum
• Zoonosis, Ebola, and the Elusive Reservoir Host
• A niche with the masses?
• New article in Science provides a comprehensive overview and update on Yellowstone National Park
• E&E in A&D: Genetic profiling as art?
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• A nice synopsis of some reasons for laughter
• Do humans form genetically similar social groups independent of kinship?
• Do cancer cells play cooperate in the Prisoner’s Dilemma?
• Hawaiian crickets converge on the same solution to eavesdropping parasites
• Cath Dennis publishes non-computerized classroom adaptation of Axelrod’s iPD Tournament
• Our review paper on Late Pleistocene Extinction Modeling published in QRB!
• Apparently I should stop holding my breath for the Google Translate “dolphin” module
• 0.5% to 3%: Do we now have a better sense of what makes people smart?
• David Haig suggests that babies cry at night to prevent siblings
• Cognitive Ethology and Cat Companionship
• If sloths endure costs to maintain closed-loop agricultural systems, why can’t we?
• Okay, I admit it: I am a bit of a Neanderthal
• Model evidence that third party punishment only makes sense in tight-knit groups
• Understanding the cascading effect of carnivore loss… before we lose all the carnivores
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• In bird reproduction, parasitism and cooperation coevolve
• Curiosity and culturomics
• Are MOOCs just the clunky starting place for a more evolved form of new teaching?
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• Would a different term make us better appreciate ecosystem services?
• Caterpillars weaponize nicotine
• Taking risks for the data
• “Brainchildren” — another way to conceptualize our devotion to cultural fitness
• Are MOOCs and the arts incompatible?
• Barash the gene accountant on that little economic driver called “reproduction”
• Does self organization of social networks foster cooperation in the face of cheating?
• Microbes may surf their way to successful cooperation
• Open Access publishing and “peer review” fail the test of a well-designed hoax
• More press for paper that de-bunks the zero determinant superiority
• Cooperative child-rearing pays dividends for ruffed lemurs, irrespective of kinship
• National Geographic “The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion”
• Zero determinant strategy is just another short-term adaptation
• New theory explaining the prevalence of homosexuality focuses on epigenetics
• Quantifying the climate value of that 40-acre woodlot
• Green port policies yield big decreases in the ecological footprint of shipping
• As the nature of university-level teaching changes, should we re-assess the credit hour?
• Brief NYT article on empathy in children
• Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
• Production on marginal lands can meet only 25% of our biofuel mandates
• If your “free will” is questionable, feel free to exercise your “free won’t”
• Do our brains require endurance activity in order to function?
• Barash not so enlightening on the paradox of human homosexuality
• Multiple Intelligences theory gets some neuroscientific support
• Freeman Dyson wins the contest, and then says the contest is stupid
• G. Kim Blank on making writing work better by eliminating the term paper
• New evidence that economic cooperation existed between Vikings and Inuit
• National Geographic feature on penguin propulsion
• Further evidence that Hamilton was wrong about eusocial insects
• Making the formation of social networks more realistic also makes them more cooperative
• Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
• Slate article explores the big brain, big society connection
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• Chronicle of Higher Education feature explores the question of why more women do not succeed in science
• Michael Ruse on James Lovelock’s Gaia of 2012
• Ready for eugenics 2.0?
• On becoming a psychopath
• Rogue iron fertilization? Things have gotten weird!
• New PNAS special issue explores the developmental effects of early social environment
• Rob Nixon on Rachel Carson’s prescience
• Barry Commoner, pioneering scientist and environmentalist, is dead at 95
• Enforcing norms may be for personal gain, not to maintain social order (at least amongst Santa Barbara undergraduates)
• Lack of complete transparency presents an obstacle but not a block to cooperation
• Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, cannot triangulate punishment
• Punishment, properly rewarded, can promote cooperation without corruption
• Want a good gauge of how much humans pollute waterways? Just measure for caffeine!
• The humble Mistletoe turns out to be a probable keystone species
• Does anthropogenic change make natives into invaders?
• Are the Sentinelese the last untouched hunter-gatherer culture?
• Rachel Carson still under attack for bringing her values to bear on her science
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• Would online data repositories solve the problem of scientific fraud?
• If your loners are truly loners they won’t punish, and cooperation thrives even in the presence of antisocial punishment
• Perhaps nestedness is just an artifact of ecological opportunity (and not stability)
• A final solution to the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma?
• Daniel Dennett on Darwin and Turing’s “strange inversion of reasoning”
• Evolution may be too slow: British Columbia begins assisted migration of forests
• National Geographic’s “If They Could Only Talk” considers Easter Island’s many mysteries
• Are the population dynamics of Dupont’s lark dictated by multilevel selective pressures?
• Tim Birkenhead on anthropomorphism and animal emotion
• David Barash illuminates the “EvoPolitics” of Darwin’s time
• Great Michael Ruse piece on the politics of resisting religious encroachment on evolutionary biology
• Ted Kaczynski as a scholar of resistance to technology
• Understanding the role of the Templeton Foundation in funding evolutionary biology research
• Preschoolers cooperatively rock chimps in puzzle tournament
• Mutualistic fungus transfers nitrogen from parasitized insects to its plant host
• North Carolina legislators enact strict law limiting the rate of natural change
• Familiarity breeds… mutual aid (at least in some birds)
• Scientific American “Why We Help”
• There is no doubt that there are conservation trade-offs associated with the proliferation of wind power
• Self-castration sometimes turns out to be good for reproductive success
• Longer telomeres imparted by older fathers may forestall senescence
• Honey bees harbor a remarkably diverse community of mutualistic gut microbes
• Lyme disease extensification may have more to do with foxes than deer
• Is Alzheimer’s disease caused by prion proliferation?
• Surprisingly, rugby can be used to understand honest signaling
• Aquatic food chains have gotten longer and less diverse over evolutionary time
• Mesocosm experiment considers the effects of human modification of community structure
• New study on birds uses remote tracking to provide detailed behavioral data
• A comparison of behaviorally-based animal diseases reminds us of the kingdom in which we belong
• New comprehensive data synthesis favors a pluralistic explanation for Eurasian mammoth extinction
• The Australian Government blocks coal mine to protect the Great Barrier Reef
• Now if you could only keep your cytosine methylated you might live forever
• Bonobo sequence establishes that humans are equally but dissimilarly related to our chimpanzee relatives
• NY Times provides perspective on E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• PNAS paper explores the role of population structure in facilitating reciprocity
• Richard Dawkins on E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• Does climate change have the potential to reduce the stabilizing effects of biodiversity?
• Economic Whales and their Parasites
• {Canis lupus familiaris + Homo sapiens} versus Homo neanderthalenthis?
• Is the origin of all life the gyre?
• Paulinella chromatophora’s photosynthetic engine blurs the line between endosymbiont and organelle
• Why don’t other animals make better use of punishment?
• An argument for better Frankensteins (and thus more prudent use of technology)
• Can cod come back?
• Richard Sennett’s “Together” explores the history of cooperative rituals
• Is the sustainability movement too eco-centric?
• John Horgan reviews Robert Trivers’ “The Folly of Fools”
• Olivia Judson reviews Mark Pagel’s “Wired for Culture”
• Is the European Union going rogue or playing altruist on airline emissions?
• Costly signalling not so costly in the presence of comrades
• A fabulous article on the collective efforts that created the World Wide Web and the corporate efforts to destroy it
• Rand and Nowak paper on antisocial punishment in public goods games
• What can Dean Potter teach us about evolution?
• Economics and Human Satisfaction
• National Geographic “Can China go green?”
• Barash and Lipton on Bin Laden (and Us)
• NY Times way behind the times on Nature versus Nurture
• Contemporary Human Cooperation With Non-Kin Probably No Mistake
• Saving Puffins, One Clip at a Time
• Mirsky on Poop in Space
• Reclaiming a Rigorous Definition of “Sustainability”
• Are Eco-labels an Effective Tool for Conservation?
• Delayed Development and Human Evolution
• Robert Trivers and colleagues on Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson’s “The evolution of eusociality”
• National Geographic “Wolf Wars”
• Understanding biome-level response to climate change
• National Geographic “Fatal Attraction”

Assessment Methods (19)

• An analysis of my course evaluations (Spring 2019)
• How Moodle allows you to remove your bias when grading quizzes
• An interesting model for ditching the deadline
• An analysis of my course evaluations for Spring 2016
• Is there any way to get students to come to class on time?
• Should altruism have an effect on your final exam score?
• Would killing my final exam make my class more memorable?
• An analysis of my course evaluations for Spring 2015
• Celebrating Studios Days Spring 2015
• Recommendations for creating a more student-centered classroom
• Evolution 2014: Day 2
• Evolution 2014: EvoGrader will take the grading out of assessing student learning outcomes
• Evolution 2014: A clever way to see if creationist students understand evolutionary concepts
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Open Information Environments and the 21st Century College Classroom
• My decision to make my course evaluations public
• How will I deliver conceptual understanding?
• Embarking on a grand experiment in conceptual teaching
• G. Kim Blank on making writing work better by eliminating the term paper

Astrobiology (1)

• Man or astrobiology man?

Astronomy (2)

• Pratt students make the potential trip to Mars better designed
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• Man or astrobiology man?
• Mirsky on Poop in Space

Behavior (101)

• Don’t blame people for being obese (blame their neighborhood)
• Mom: “Eat my sh*t and then help your younger siblings”
• Mom leaves, offspring get buff and work together
• My entry on the evolution of play will be added to the massive Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science
• PBS’ Deep Look on mole crabs
• PBS’ Deep Look on Firefly communication and deception
• Why Artists & Designers need Scientists: Exhibit A
• Fantastic piece on nature/nurture by Patrick F. Clarkin in TVOL
• Pratt News features short piece on Dr. Roland Kays’s campus visit
• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• Support the mighty Bombardier Beetle’s quest to have its genome sequenced!
• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Hedgehogs, Raccoons, and Urbanite Biophilia
• NPR features Christopher Boehm on the love-hate relationship we have people in power
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• Arming the Donkeys on kids, parenting, and Burning Man
• My article on adolescence featured in the This View of Life culture series
• A potentially interesting Evolution of Play documentary
• America Society of Primatologists condemns H. A. and Margret Rey, calls for Curious George boycott
• My next Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk: Columbia University on March 7th, 2016
• I visit Pratt’s Poetics Lab focused on play
• Dan Ariely’s “Arming the Donkeys” podcast
• What do we know about Cultural Transmission?
• Food is personal, sometimes ethical, but rarely political
• How do we know when people are actually happy?
• Is there a trade-off between reproduction and creativity?
• How the built environment influences our ability to sustain personal and environmental commitments
• It was an honor to talk to St. Francis College!
• My first “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators” talk: next Friday at St. Francis College
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• Primates — but not their rodent relatives — can infer the effects of other individuals on resource availability
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• Maybe infants don’t really care who helps and who hinders after all…
• Fascinating and clever study of how personal contact norms vary by relationship
• Jonathan Haidt on the business advantage of being ethical
• That beard and deep voice may be to put him in his place, not attract her
• What’s the evolved function of curiosity?
• Group phenotypic composition: implications for individuals and their groups
• The prickly (and largely unknown) sex life of bats
• David Sloan Wilson on how Jeff Bezos don’t know squat about chickens (or evolution!)
• Does Bayesian bias aid us in making adaptive distorted self-assessments?
• Malcolm Gladwell on the social contagion of mass shootings
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• The often-large difference between “breeding” and “parenting”
• New report on drug resistance highlights the tragedy of our antibiotics commons
• Do creative people have “messy minds”?
• Does the ability to accumulate wealth make us value the future more?
• Formation of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution has the potential to catalyze research into how culture evolves
• When it comes to sex, we are consumately proximate
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• A chance to learn how an understanding of empathy can inform design
• Our culture is special, but not especially uncommon
• Have we outgrown the scale of cooperation supported by the Big Gods of Big Religion?
• WmD Episode #00003 has been released
• Music, the cortisone balm?
• So much for the big-brained city bird theory?
• The costly nature of wind pollination
• E&E in A&D: The Armstrong Lie
• Our paper on a super-rational solution to the tragedy of the commons published in Scientific Reports
• Review of What We Made by Tom Finkelpearl
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• A nice synopsis of some reasons for laughter
• Do humans form genetically similar social groups independent of kinship?
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Hawaiian crickets converge on the same solution to eavesdropping parasites
• Apparently I should stop holding my breath for the Google Translate “dolphin” module
• Is “nest parasitism” really “nest mutualism”?
• David Haig suggests that babies cry at night to prevent siblings
• Cognitive Ethology and Cat Companionship
• If sloths endure costs to maintain closed-loop agricultural systems, why can’t we?
• String Theory: should we care?
• Model evidence that third party punishment only makes sense in tight-knit groups
• Caterpillars weaponize nicotine
• Taking risks for the data
• Writing and record-keeping as important tools in the evolution of large-scale human cooperation
• Should we emulate the cooperative and conservative habits of the sloth?
• An anecdote that illustrates the tremendous power of human network reciprocity
• My review of “Origins of Altruism and Cooperation” is published in QRB
• Schadenfreude as an instinct born of being a social, hierarchical animal
• National Geographic “The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion”
• Think the Milgram Experiments tell us something definitive about human nature? Think again!
• Zero determinant strategy is just another short-term adaptation
• Mammal monogamy still a mystery, but maybe more than a numbers game
• Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno
• Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
• Brief NYT article on empathy in children
• Montreal art installation rewards cooperative play with musical novelty
• If your “free will” is questionable, feel free to exercise your “free won’t”
• Multiple Intelligences theory gets some neuroscientific support
• NPR provides a quick overview of the human drive to reciprocate
• National Geographic feature on penguin propulsion
• Further evidence that Hamilton was wrong about eusocial insects
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• Megan Frederickson shares the wonder of ant cooperation with Toronto Library patrons
• On becoming a psychopath
• New PNAS special issue explores the developmental effects of early social environment
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• Can neuroeconomics help economics become a real science?
• Enforcing norms may be for personal gain, not to maintain social order (at least amongst Santa Barbara undergraduates)
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, cannot triangulate punishment
• “School of Life” acknowledges the values in religion worth preserving
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• Preview of the 2012 Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon
• Climate change makes mountaineering more risky
• When any behavior can be modeled, real-world constraint is critical
• Mount Everest and the limits of play
• Are the population dynamics of Dupont’s lark dictated by multilevel selective pressures?
• Tim Birkenhead on anthropomorphism and animal emotion
• Scientific American “Why We Help”
• Peacocks communicate via the (ultra)sounds they make with their feathers
• “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” exhibit at the American Museum on Natural History
• In case you were a skeptic: bears can count
• Surprisingly, rugby can be used to understand honest signaling
• New study on birds uses remote tracking to provide detailed behavioral data
• A comparison of behaviorally-based animal diseases reminds us of the kingdom in which we belong
• Can “muppet theory” help explain behavioral heterogeneity in human social groups?
• PNAS paper explores the role of population structure in facilitating reciprocity
• Human limits extended one step further as wingsuit diver lands without a parachute
• I knew that dog was watching me: Jennifer Verdolin confirms my worst fears
• Richard Sennett’s “Together” explores the history of cooperative rituals
• John Horgan reviews Robert Trivers’ “The Folly of Fools”
• Martin Nowak lecture on The Evolution of Cooperation at MIT
• What can Dean Potter teach us about evolution?

Behavioral Ecology (37)

• Mom leaves, offspring get buff and work together
• My entry on the evolution of play will be added to the massive Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science
• PBS’ Deep Look on mole crabs
• PBS’ Deep Look on Firefly communication and deception
• Fantastic piece on nature/nurture by Patrick F. Clarkin in TVOL
• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Hedgehogs, Raccoons, and Urbanite Biophilia
• How the built environment influences our ability to sustain personal and environmental commitments
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• Fascinating and clever study of how personal contact norms vary by relationship
• That beard and deep voice may be to put him in his place, not attract her
• Are parasites really ecologically necessary?
• Does the ability to accumulate wealth make us value the future more?
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• Our paper on a super-rational solution to the tragedy of the commons published in Scientific Reports
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• Apparently I should stop holding my breath for the Google Translate “dolphin” module
• Cognitive Ethology and Cat Companionship
• If sloths endure costs to maintain closed-loop agricultural systems, why can’t we?
• Caterpillars weaponize nicotine
• New research suggests that chimpanzees understand that cooperation produces benefits
• Should we emulate the cooperative and conservative habits of the sloth?
• Cooperative child-rearing pays dividends for ruffed lemurs, irrespective of kinship
• National Geographic “The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion”
• Mammal monogamy still a mystery, but maybe more than a numbers game
• Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno
• Working on a VUE concept map of the fieldTest simulation
• Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, cannot triangulate punishment
• When any behavior can be modeled, real-world constraint is critical
• New study on birds uses remote tracking to provide detailed behavioral data
• I knew that dog was watching me: Jennifer Verdolin confirms my worst fears
• Patterns in mussel beds may reflect interaction between individual behavior and emergent environmental patterns
• Martin Nowak lecture on The Evolution of Cooperation at MIT
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• Robert Trivers and colleagues on Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson’s “The evolution of eusociality”

Belief (38)

• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• Alternative music legend Morrissey agrees to adopt 2 million feral cats in win-win for felines, Australian native fauna
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• What do we know about Cultural Transmission?
• Food is personal, sometimes ethical, but rarely political
• How do we know when people are actually happy?
• Injury intuition confirmation bias? Farce article goes really viral
• Would a “labor economy” lead to different outcomes than the “capital economy”?
• My personal experience that creationists gravitate to anything with even the faintest scent of scientific uncertainty (and what to do about it)
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• Crucial climate talks in Paris take place in a socially repressive environment
• Do we need to have a kinder, gentler one-child policy in Western industrial countries?
• Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
• Should we compromise with nations that hunt whales?
• Anne-Marie Slaughter on the tradeoff between work and caregiving
• When it comes to sex, we are consumately proximate
• Have we outgrown the scale of cooperation supported by the Big Gods of Big Religion?
• WmD Episode #00002 has been released
• Zoonosis, Ebola, and the Elusive Reservoir Host
• The forces of cultural evolution push hard on political humor
• John Oliver holds first “balanced” climate debate on television
• Cognitive Ethology and Cat Companionship
• String Theory: should we care?
• Can you replicate the collective adaptive value of religion without god?
• Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• Does American faith in genetic determinism limit the achievement of our students?
• Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• Can neuroeconomics help economics become a real science?
• “School of Life” acknowledges the values in religion worth preserving
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• Peter Turchin on Steven Pinker’s “Grand Deception” hypotheses
• Ted Kaczynski as a scholar of resistance to technology
• Hurricane Irene evacuation naysayers point out some fundamental human problems with understanding risk
• Make Every Day Darwin Day, Minus the Darwin
• An Introduction

Biodiversity Loss (65)

• Australia’s a hot spot for climate change politics, climate change science, and climate change suffering
• What might we discover in the ocean twilight zone?
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• BLUE WEEK 2017 comes to Pratt Institute
• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Science and art in dialogue: Pratt Manhattan Gallery hosts Dr. Rachael Winfree
• Skeptoid podcast on Colony Collapse Disorder
• My ecological footprint for 2016-2017
• Biophotovoltaics: a promising design innovation, or a great example of lack of quantitative design?
• Alternative music legend Morrissey agrees to adopt 2 million feral cats in win-win for felines, Australian native fauna
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• “This is the Nature of Cities” podcast on urban bees and civic ecology
• “Science: A Candle in the Dark” podcast on Urban Ecology
• “In Defense of Plants” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the return of five-lined skinks
• Does the rapid spread of a culture of over-exploitation intensify our impact on wild food sources?
• Shark attacks are down, but you still have to make good decisions out there on the ocean
• While we vacuum the seas, we may as well clean them of debris…
• Mist net photographs as art?
• Without sustainability in our diets, we won’t be sustainable
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on synanthropes and urban island castaways
• Should we compromise with nations that hunt whales?
• Are big corporate polluters trying to “artwash” their image?
• Go mutualistic or go home?
• Sadly, the Population Bombers (mostly) still don’t get it
• New article in Science provides a comprehensive overview and update on Yellowstone National Park
• Evolution 2014: Could the right symbionts provide protection from chytrid infection to amphibians?
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• Our review paper on Late Pleistocene Extinction Modeling published in QRB!
• Understanding the cascading effect of carnivore loss… before we lose all the carnivores
• Cod gone on Cape Cod
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• Would a different term make us better appreciate ecosystem services?
• With all we know, we still know too little to reliably re-engineer ecosystems
• New evidence of whooping crane culture on the rebound
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• Rogue iron fertilization? Things have gotten weird!
• Rob Nixon on Rachel Carson’s prescience
• Barry Commoner, pioneering scientist and environmentalist, is dead at 95
• Does anthropogenic change make natives into invaders?
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• Rachel Carson still under attack for bringing her values to bear on her science
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• High-throughput screening accelerates the rate at which evolved plant chemicals can be turned into medicine
• Fences exclude invasive predators, give aid to threatened Hawaiian birds
• The ecological impacts of the BP-Deepwater Horizon oil spill quantified
• Extensive long-term studies document the effect of biodiversity in ecosystem productivity
• New study published in Ecology Letters quantifies the effects of intensive agriculture on large-scale biodiversity
• Would you like a few red-listed species with that shrimp cocktail sir?
• There is no doubt that there are conservation trade-offs associated with the proliferation of wind power
• The Australian Government blocks coal mine to protect the Great Barrier Reef
• Can cod come back?
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Saving Puffins, One Clip at a Time
• Using Ecological Footprints to Teach Sustainability
• Are Eco-labels an Effective Tool for Conservation?
• Official video of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010
• 2010 Convention on Biological Diversity and Ecosystem Services (Sorta)
• National Geographic “Wolf Wars”
• The Cove

Biography (10)

• Alan Rabinowitz, 1953-2018
• A Tribute to Dr. David Becker on the Occasion of his Retirement
• Lev Ginzburg Fest: celebration of a “retirement”
• Review of William B. Provine’s “The ‘Random Genetic Drift’ Fallacy”
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• Was Teilhard de Chardin the real inventor of an evolutionary approach to culture?
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• Michael Ruse on James Lovelock’s Gaia of 2012
• Rob Nixon on Rachel Carson’s prescience
• Barry Commoner, pioneering scientist and environmentalist, is dead at 95
• Rachel Carson still under attack for bringing her values to bear on her science
• Elinor Ostrom, pioneering social scientist and scholar of cooperation, is dead at 78
• Marvin Charton, Pratt professor and renowned computational chemist, is dead at 80
• The tragically early passing of Fred Rubino, an influential Brooklyn educator
• Do you still think God is good?

Biology (general) (4)

• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• A Tribute to Dr. David Becker on the Occasion of his Retirement
• Chronicle of Higher Education feature explores the question of why more women do not succeed in science
• Biocreativity blog explores the interaction between biology and art

Biomes (9)

• Core of Me short video
• Are corals riding ocean currents to exert climate change dominance over macroalgae?
• What might we discover in the ocean twilight zone?
• PBS’ Deep Look on mole crabs
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Deep Look on nutrient transport by salmon
• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• BLUE WEEK 2017 comes to Pratt Institute
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• Like boats & science?… this might be the artist’s residency for you!
• 2016 Sustainability Summit live on Pratt’s Video Site
• Where’s the world’s biggest solar-electric power station going to be located?
• My ecological footprint for 2015-2016
• Like to forage for mushrooms? Beware the Amanita!
• While we vacuum the seas, we may as well clean them of debris…
• Why the “just burn it all” approach to ending fossil fuel dependence does not work
• Charismatic megafauna offer protection to their less appealing heterospecifics
• Without sustainability in our diets, we won’t be sustainable
• ECOmotion Studios on Hairston Smith Slobodkin and why the earth is green
• EcoMotion studios celebrates Robert Paine’s Pisaster experiments
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• WmD Episode #00003 has been released
• Rivers, Lakes, Seas, and Environmental Justice
• My ecological footprint for 2014-2015
• Water, Alfalfa, China, and a modern Tragedy of the Commons
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• If sloths endure costs to maintain closed-loop agricultural systems, why can’t we?
• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• Cod gone on Cape Cod
• Concentrated factory farming of livestock massively alters the phosphorus cycle
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• Now legal, Northern California’s pot farms join the rest of agriculture in impacting water supply
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• Should we emulate the cooperative and conservative habits of the sloth?
• With all we know, we still know too little to reliably re-engineer ecosystems
• Cooperative child-rearing pays dividends for ruffed lemurs, irrespective of kinship
• National Geographic “The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion”
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno
• Quantifying the climate value of that 40-acre woodlot
• Production on marginal lands can meet only 25% of our biofuel mandates
• National Geographic feature on penguin propulsion
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• Megan Frederickson shares the wonder of ant cooperation with Toronto Library patrons
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• Rogue iron fertilization? Things have gotten weird!
• Rob Nixon on Rachel Carson’s prescience
• Want a good gauge of how much humans pollute waterways? Just measure for caffeine!
• Are the Sentinelese the last untouched hunter-gatherer culture?
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• The many ecotones of the Columbia Gorge
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• High tech ad hoc fixes face off against good old-fashioned prevention in the Baltic Sea
• The ecological impacts of the BP-Deepwater Horizon oil spill quantified
• Evolution may be too slow: British Columbia begins assisted migration of forests
• Would you like a few red-listed species with that shrimp cocktail sir?
• “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” exhibit at the American Museum on Natural History
• Molly H. Adams earns top honors from the Critical and Visual Studies program
• BBC covers the up side of the North Pacific plastic “garbage patch”
• 2012 Sustainability Crash Course at Pratt Institute
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Patterns in mussel beds may reflect interaction between individual behavior and emergent environmental patterns
• Aquaculture on Leonard Lopate
• Sex and Slime on Fresh Air
• Saving Puffins, One Clip at a Time
• Asian Carp on NPR
• National Geographic “Wolf Wars”
• The Cove
• Understanding biome-level response to climate change
• National Geographic “Fatal Attraction”
• ESA 2009 Day #1 (Sunday)

Birds (11)

• Who was the first to catalog color? Hint: it wasn’t designers!
• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• “Science: A Candle in the Dark” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Mist net photographs as art?
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on synanthropes and urban island castaways
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• So much for the big-brained city bird theory?
• Is “nest parasitism” really “nest mutualism”?
• Bird study suggests that multilevel selection theory is necessary to understand population dynamics
• Familiarity breeds… mutual aid (at least in some birds)
• There is no doubt that there are conservation trade-offs associated with the proliferation of wind power

Bogs & Wetlands (6)

• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• The ecological impacts of the BP-Deepwater Horizon oil spill quantified
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• National Geographic “Fatal Attraction”

Books (20)

• My review of new edited Trophic Ecology book out in the Quarterly Review of Biology
• What do we know about Cultural Transmission?
• Review of William B. Provine’s “The ‘Random Genetic Drift’ Fallacy”
• My testimonial for Gregory Tague’s “Evolution and Human Culture”
• Review of What We Made by Tom Finkelpearl
• My review of “Origins of Altruism and Cooperation” is published in QRB
• My review of “How Species Interact” published in Ecological Modelling
• NY Times provides perspective on E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• Richard Dawkins on E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• Olivia Judson reviews Mark Pagel’s “Wired for Culture”
• Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild”
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• Science in Art & Design: Justin Taylor’s “The Gospel of Anarchy”
• “DNA” by James D. Watson
• “A Paradise Built in Hell” by Rebecca Solnit
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution
• The Quest for the Perfect Hive
• Consilience
• Crade-to-Cradle

Brain size (5)

• Can a realistically-parameterized model tell us why our brains are so big?
• So much for the big-brained city bird theory?
• Do our brains require endurance activity in order to function?
• Slate article explores the big brain, big society connection
• Identifying the genes that gave dolphins their big brains

Breeders, Propagators, & Creators (31)

Canids (5)

• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• Dog license dataset opens up huge potential for understanding the dog-human mutualism
• {Canis lupus familiaris + Homo sapiens} versus Homo neanderthalenthis?
• I knew that dog was watching me: Jennifer Verdolin confirms my worst fears

Carrying Capacity (18)

• Eco 101: Carrying Capacity
• Lev Ginzburg Fest: celebration of a “retirement”
• My first “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators” talk: next Friday at St. Francis College
• Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
• China shifts a failed cultural policy designed to stabilize population
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• ECOmotion Studios on Hairston Smith Slobodkin and why the earth is green
• Carrying capacity — but not growth rate — varies with habitat quality (at least for moose)
• Sadly, the Population Bombers (mostly) still don’t get it
• Why socially-progressive scientists should not make bets…
• National Geographic “The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion”
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Joel E. Cohen on the 7 billion human mark
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Online tools for teaching the basics of population growth

Center for Sustainable Design Studies (7)

• Green Week 2017 opens at Pratt Institute
• Pledge, Petition, Protect! All at Green Week 2014!
• TurnUp seeks to turn excess art materials into treasure, not trash
• Pratt Envirolutions Students Bring Recycling Bins to Campus
• 2012 Sustainability Crash Course at Pratt Institute
• Pratt Envirolutions leads campaign for reusable containers
• Quantitative Sustainability and the practice of Life Cycle Analysis

Center for Teaching & Learning (2)

Cetaceans (4)

• Our culture is special, but not especially uncommon
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on big animals in big cities
• Identifying the genes that gave dolphins their big brains
• Are dolphins on their way to domesticating humans?

Chemistry (2)

• Rachel Carson still under attack for bringing her values to bear on her science
• Marvin Charton, Pratt professor and renowned computational chemist, is dead at 80

Citizen Science (4)

• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• “Science: A Candle in the Dark” podcast on Urban Ecology
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• Rogue iron fertilization? Things have gotten weird!

Climate Change (77)

• How will the COVID-19 crisis affect action on climate change?
• Core of Me short video
• Eco-Performance Lab during Pratt’s 2019 Green Week the first step of “To the Core of Me”
• My newest STEAMplant collaboration is “To the Core of Me: A Hike Play”
• How renewable power sources grow more trees
• Australia’s a hot spot for climate change politics, climate change science, and climate change suffering
• Wildfires driven more by lowered precipitation than elevated temperatures or reduced snowpack
• Are corals riding ocean currents to exert climate change dominance over macroalgae?
• No-till has some big no-catastrophic-climate-change potential
• What might we discover in the ocean twilight zone?
• Model suggests that warming climate will catalyze greater insect-pest crop losses
• Is it possible that Trump’s science-adviser is a stealth climate-change accepter?
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• BLUE WEEK 2017 comes to Pratt Institute
• Republicans release climate change plan based on “Respiration Reduction”
• Skeptoid podcast on Colony Collapse Disorder
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• 2016 Sustainability Summit live on Pratt’s Video Site
• My ecological footprint for 2016-2017
• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• Biophotovoltaics: a promising design innovation, or a great example of lack of quantitative design?
• It’s good to remember how fast things change, culturally & biologically
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• Students succeed in convincing the Pratt Board of Trustees to divest from fossil fuels
• Is New York City a “sustainable” metropolis?
• Crucial climate talks in Paris take place in a socially repressive environment
• Cargo ships a major source of NOx emissions
• Why the “just burn it all” approach to ending fossil fuel dependence does not work
• Without sustainability in our diets, we won’t be sustainable
• Are big corporate polluters trying to “artwash” their image?
• Sadly, the Population Bombers (mostly) still don’t get it
• Court Ruling in the Netherlands may point the way to cracking the climate compliance conundrum
• In the end, climate compromise comes down to writing and editing
• On the verge of 400 ppm Carbon Dioxide: a symbolic threshold
• Water, Alfalfa, China, and a modern Tragedy of the Commons
• John Oliver holds first “balanced” climate debate on television
• Our review paper on Late Pleistocene Extinction Modeling published in QRB!
• New glacial maximum on Mount ARC provides definitive evidence that Pratt’s sustainability efforts are working
• Interesting numbers on the sustainability (or lack thereof) of the aviation industry
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• CNN tackles climate change by explaining public goods games!
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• Would a different term make us better appreciate ecosystem services?
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Great NPR piece on how simple it would be for us to reduce carbon emissions
• “Earth Hour” seeks to re-focus our attention on all the earth provides
• Forward on Climate Rally seeks to shift the national dialogue on anthropogenic climate change
• Quantifying the climate value of that 40-acre woodlot
• Production on marginal lands can meet only 25% of our biofuel mandates
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• Michael Ruse on James Lovelock’s Gaia of 2012
• Rogue iron fertilization? Things have gotten weird!
• Rob Nixon on Rachel Carson’s prescience
• Barry Commoner, pioneering scientist and environmentalist, is dead at 95
• Some conservatives actually see the public health and economic dilemmas posed by greenhouse gas emissions
• Can proper education allow reputation to foster action on climate change?
• Climate and Clean Air Coalition unites air pollution concerns
• Are the Sentinelese the last untouched hunter-gatherer culture?
• Rebranding global warming as a health threat
• “Adaptive” approach to climate change puts faith in resilience thinking
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• Mark Bittman on the ecological imperative of eating less meat
• Climate change makes mountaineering more risky
• Evolution may be too slow: British Columbia begins assisted migration of forests
• North Carolina legislators enact strict law limiting the rate of natural change
• Scientific American “Why We Help”
• Does climate change have the potential to reduce the stabilizing effects of biodiversity?
• Is the European Union going rogue or playing altruist on airline emissions?
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Hurricane Irene evacuation naysayers point out some fundamental human problems with understanding risk
• Saving Puffins, One Clip at a Time
• Using Ecological Footprints to Teach Sustainability
• Official video of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010
• Understanding biome-level response to climate change
• Changing and not changing the way we use our agricultural land

Closed Loop Systems (10)

• What can be made by mimicking biological “assemblies”?
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• If sloths endure costs to maintain closed-loop agricultural systems, why can’t we?
• TurnUp seeks to turn excess art materials into treasure, not trash
• Concentrated factory farming of livestock massively alters the phosphorus cycle
• NPR piece suggests that economics are pushing us towards nutrient recycling
• Quantifying the climate value of that 40-acre woodlot
• Charlotte Douglas International Airport employs worms to close the loop on airport waste
• Envirolutions students release Trash Tetris video to promote recycling bin launch
• Crade-to-Cradle

Coevolution (53)

• STEAMplant project brings local primary school kids to Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2019)
• We aren’t the only gardeners on Madgascar
• Parasites better watch out for parasites!
• PBS’ Deep Look on Firefly communication and deception
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2017)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2017)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2016)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2016)
• Can understanding cooperation lead to higher-yield crops?
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• Are parasites really ecologically necessary?
• EcoMotion studios celebrates Robert Paine’s Pisaster experiments
• New report on drug resistance highlights the tragedy of our antibiotics commons
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• So much for the big-brained city bird theory?
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on big animals in big cities
• Urban tree power
• Zoonosis, Ebola, and the Elusive Reservoir Host
• Our paper on a super-rational solution to the tragedy of the commons published in Scientific Reports
• Evolution 2014: Day 1
• Evolution 2014: Could the right symbionts provide protection from chytrid infection to amphibians?
• Evolution 2014: Are island mutualist communities more likely to be nested because they are inherently more unstable?
• Evolution 2014: Lemurs display huge diet diversity, and their gut microbes track this diversity
• Evolution 2014: Aphids protect themselves from parasitoids by harboring a bacteria whose viral parasite is toxic
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Hawaiian crickets converge on the same solution to eavesdropping parasites
• Is “nest parasitism” really “nest mutualism”?
• If sloths endure costs to maintain closed-loop agricultural systems, why can’t we?
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• In bird reproduction, parasitism and cooperation coevolve
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• Caterpillars weaponize nicotine
• Should we emulate the cooperative and conservative habits of the sloth?
• Additional evidence that obesity may be due to environment, not just habits
• A tour of your diverse microbiome, and the things that might deplete that diversity
• Zero determinant strategy is just another short-term adaptation
• Dog license dataset opens up huge potential for understanding the dog-human mutualism
• National Geographic feature on penguin propulsion
• Making the formation of social networks more realistic also makes them more cooperative
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• Megan Frederickson shares the wonder of ant cooperation with Toronto Library patrons
• Does anthropogenic change make natives into invaders?
• Rachel Carson still under attack for bringing her values to bear on her science
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• Perhaps nestedness is just an artifact of ecological opportunity (and not stability)
• Steven Pinker makes it clear that he is not a “group selectionist”
• Mutualistic fungus transfers nitrogen from parasitized insects to its plant host
• Honey bees harbor a remarkably diverse community of mutualistic gut microbes
• “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” exhibit at the American Museum on Natural History
• {Canis lupus familiaris + Homo sapiens} versus Homo neanderthalenthis?
• Aquaculture on Leonard Lopate
• Being Clean Might Make You Allergic
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• National Geographic’s “Science of Dogs”
• Asian Carp on NPR
• The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution
• Sourcing sources of selection
• The Quest for the Perfect Hive

Cognitive Ability (13)

• Can a realistically-parameterized model tell us why our brains are so big?
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Hedgehogs, Raccoons, and Urbanite Biophilia
• FDA investigators raid American Society of Human Genetics offices in Carl Zimmer cloning case
• What’s the evolved function of curiosity?
• Does Bayesian bias aid us in making adaptive distorted self-assessments?
• My testimonial for Gregory Tague’s “Evolution and Human Culture”
• So much for the big-brained city bird theory?
• Apparently I should stop holding my breath for the Google Translate “dolphin” module
• 0.5% to 3%: Do we now have a better sense of what makes people smart?
• Do we need to delete to keep the web sustainable?
• When any behavior can be modeled, real-world constraint is critical
• Identifying the genes that gave dolphins their big brains
• Daniel Dennett on Darwin and Turing’s “strange inversion of reasoning”

Cognitive Bias (2)

• Why Artists & Designers need Scientists: Exhibit A
• Dan Ariely’s “Arming the Donkeys” podcast

Collaborative Art (2)

• Julia Buntaine explores the potential power of art and science collaborations
• Review of What We Made by Tom Finkelpearl

Commensalism (9)

• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Hedgehogs, Raccoons, and Urbanite Biophilia
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the return of five-lined skinks
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on synanthropes and urban island castaways
• Go mutualistic or go home?
• So much for the big-brained city bird theory?
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on big animals in big cities
• Big felines have lots of commensal fans

Communication (15)

• My entry on the evolution of play will be added to the massive Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science
• PBS’ Deep Look on Firefly communication and deception
• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• Dan Ariely’s “Arming the Donkeys” podcast
• What do we know about Cultural Transmission?
• Fascinating and clever study of how personal contact norms vary by relationship
• That beard and deep voice may be to put him in his place, not attract her
• Our culture is special, but not especially uncommon
• Review of What We Made by Tom Finkelpearl
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• A nice synopsis of some reasons for laughter
• Apparently I should stop holding my breath for the Google Translate “dolphin” module
• Peacocks communicate via the (ultra)sounds they make with their feathers
• Surprisingly, rugby can be used to understand honest signaling
• John Horgan reviews Robert Trivers’ “The Folly of Fools”

Community Ecology (31)

• STEAMplant project brings local primary school kids to Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Deep Look on nutrient transport by salmon
• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• My review of new edited Trophic Ecology book out in the Quarterly Review of Biology
• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Science and art in dialogue: Pratt Manhattan Gallery hosts Dr. Rachael Winfree
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• “In Defense of Plants” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Are parasites really ecologically necessary?
• Shark attacks are down, but you still have to make good decisions out there on the ocean
• ECOmotion Studios on Simberloff & Wilson’s island biogeography experiments
• ECOmotion Studios on Hairston Smith Slobodkin and why the earth is green
• EcoMotion studios celebrates Robert Paine’s Pisaster experiments
• Carrying capacity — but not growth rate — varies with habitat quality (at least for moose)
• My new favorite concept mapping activity: depicting whole-system ecological flows
• Evolution beyond adaptation: a critical step for evolutionary theory
• New article in Science provides a comprehensive overview and update on Yellowstone National Park
• Our review paper on Late Pleistocene Extinction Modeling published in QRB!
• If sloths endure costs to maintain closed-loop agricultural systems, why can’t we?
• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology
• Understanding the cascading effect of carnivore loss… before we lose all the carnivores
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• With all we know, we still know too little to reliably re-engineer ecosystems
• Megan Frederickson shares the wonder of ant cooperation with Toronto Library patrons
• Rogue iron fertilization? Things have gotten weird!
• The humble Mistletoe turns out to be a probable keystone species
• Aquatic food chains have gotten longer and less diverse over evolutionary time
• Digital organisms yield new insights into the effects of extinction on long-term phylogenetic patterns of evolution
• Mesocosm experiment considers the effects of human modification of community structure
• Big felines have lots of commensal fans
• Does climate change have the potential to reduce the stabilizing effects of biodiversity?
• How fast do anthropogenic impacts get amplified up the food chain? Ask a bluefin!

Competition (29)

• STEAMplant project brings local primary school kids to Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden
• Mom leaves, offspring get buff and work together
• Is sexualization of women driven by the structure of our economy?
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Clever study shows how cooperative bacteria sanction — and therefore exclude — cheaters
• Can understanding cooperation lead to higher-yield crops?
• Jonathan Haidt on the business advantage of being ethical
• EcoMotion studios celebrates Robert Paine’s Pisaster experiments
• Rule number one of cooperative bacterial warfare? Be in the majority.
• WmD Episode #00002 has been released
• Urban tree power
• My new favorite concept mapping activity: depicting whole-system ecological flows
• Evolution 2014: Day 2
• Evolution 2014: Could the right symbionts provide protection from chytrid infection to amphibians?
• Evolution 2014: Is thyme a facultative mutualist with leguminous plants?
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Evolution 2014: Evolution of cooperation in the high school classroom? You bet!
• Schadenfreude as an instinct born of being a social, hierarchical animal
• Mammal monogamy still a mystery, but maybe more than a numbers game
• Working on a VUE concept map of the fieldTest simulation
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• Megan Frederickson shares the wonder of ant cooperation with Toronto Library patrons
• Does anthropogenic change make natives into invaders?
• Bacterial societies defy selfish gene predictions
• Are the population dynamics of Dupont’s lark dictated by multilevel selective pressures?
• Do you need cooperation in your model to explain why there are more right-handed people?
• “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” exhibit at the American Museum on Natural History
• Patterns in mussel beds may reflect interaction between individual behavior and emergent environmental patterns
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – Mutualistic Networks Symposium

Composting (4)

• If sloths endure costs to maintain closed-loop agricultural systems, why can’t we?
• Concentrated factory farming of livestock massively alters the phosphorus cycle
• Nice infographic on global and domestic food waste
• Charlotte Douglas International Airport employs worms to close the loop on airport waste

Computer Science (5)

• Can mathematics save us from partisan Gerrymandering?
• My personal experience that creationists gravitate to anything with even the faintest scent of scientific uncertainty (and what to do about it)
• E&E in A&D: Genetic profiling as art?
• Moodle Tip: Using anchor links to create your own course page menu
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Is this site good enough to clone?
• A fabulous article on the collective efforts that created the World Wide Web and the corporate efforts to destroy it

Computing (3)

• Useful guides for writing good pseudocode
• If Only Game Designers Were Scientists
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – “Big Models” Special Session

Concept Mapping (7)

• My new favorite concept mapping activity: depicting whole-system ecological flows
• Basic instructions for making effective concept maps using VUE
• How will I deliver conceptual understanding?
• Embarking on a grand experiment in conceptual teaching
• Working on a VUE concept map of the fieldTest simulation
• Concept mapping as a creative tool
• Proper set-up for Concept Mapping with VUE

Conceptual Teaching Assessment Project (3)

• Open Information Environments and the 21st Century College Classroom
• How will I deliver conceptual understanding?
• Embarking on a grand experiment in conceptual teaching

Conferences (59)

• I will present my EnviroAtlas class activities at NCSE 2018
• Hey, ho, Portland Oregon ESA 2017, let’s go!
• Moral Sense III approaches, June 2nd at St. Francis College
• Lev Ginzburg Fest: celebration of a “retirement”
• My Evolution 2014 talk is on YouTube
• Evolution 2014: Overall Impressions
• Evolution 2014: Day 4
• Evolution 2014: Synthesis centers can serve as incubators if they buffer researchers from the risk of failure
• Evolution 2014: Day 3
• Evolution 2014: Day 2
• Evolution 2014: Want to teach both sides? Have your students deconstruct creationist propaganda!
• Evolution 2014: EvoGrader will take the grading out of assessing student learning outcomes
• Evolution 2014: A clever way to see if creationist students understand evolutionary concepts
• Evolution 2014: The Evolution Film Festival was on fire!
• Evolution 2014: Day 1
• Evolution 2014: Could the right symbionts provide protection from chytrid infection to amphibians?
• Evolution 2014: Are island mutualist communities more likely to be nested because they are inherently more unstable?
• Evolution 2014: Is thyme a facultative mutualist with leguminous plants?
• Evolution 2014: Lemurs display huge diet diversity, and their gut microbes track this diversity
• Evolution 2014: Aphids protect themselves from parasitoids by harboring a bacteria whose viral parasite is toxic
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Evolution 2014: Evolution of cooperation in the high school classroom? You bet!
• Evolution 2014: NSF RCN-UBE program a great way to fund collaborative educational efforts
• Evolution 2014: Cooperative data collection is more meaningful than individual data collection
• Evolution 2014: Students can watch fly populations evolve in a matter of weeks
• Evolution 2014: Darwin’s “Backyard Beagle”
• Evolution 2014: Preview
• Useful guides for writing good pseudocode
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• ESA 2012 Workshop #8, Getting off the Ground with Individual-Based Modeling: A Primer for Instructors and Researchers
• Preview of the 2012 Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Interesting reports from the Consilience Conference
• Alife XIII conference explores the simulation of artificial life
• EcoHealth sponsors art competition
• National Academies Press releases proceedings for “Cooperation and Conflict” colloquium
• 2012 Sustainability Crash Course at Pratt Institute
• In the Light of Evolution V: Cooperation (January 7th)
• In the Light of Evolution V: Cooperation (An Abbreviated and Incomplete Social Network Analysis of the Speakers)
• E.O. Wilson’s “The Four Great Books of Darwin”
• ESA 2010 (Overall Impressions)
• ESA 2010 Day 6 (August 6th)
• ESA 2010 Day 5 (August 5th)
• ESA 2010 Day 4 (August 4th)
• ESA 2010 Day 3 (August 3rd)
• ESA 2010 Day 2 (August 2nd)
• ESA 2010 Day 1 (August 1st)
• Evolution 2010 (Overall Impressions)
• Evolution 2010 Day 5 (June 29th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 4 (June 28th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 3 (June 27th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 2 (June 26th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 1 (June 25th)
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – “Big Models” Special Session
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday): Afternoon sessions
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – Mutualistic Networks Symposium
• ESA 2009 Meeting Day #2 (Monday)
• ESA 2009 Day #1 (Sunday)

Consciousness (8)

• Does Bayesian bias aid us in making adaptive distorted self-assessments?
• My testimonial for Gregory Tague’s “Evolution and Human Culture”
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• Cognitive Ethology and Cat Companionship
• String Theory: should we care?
• If your “free will” is questionable, feel free to exercise your “free won’t”
• Consilience
• Patternicity and that jerk on the cell phone

Conservation Biology (63)

• I will be participating in the 2019 NCEP Teaching & Learning Studio
• Break not the ungulate culture of migration
• Humans arrive, other mammals shrink
• Both primates have their own uses for the same land
• Alan Rabinowitz, 1953-2018
• I will present my EnviroAtlas class activities at NCSE 2018
• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• BLUE WEEK 2017 comes to Pratt Institute
• Hey, ho, Portland Oregon ESA 2017, let’s go!
• Pratt News features short piece on Dr. Roland Kays’s campus visit
• Green Week 2017 opens at Pratt Institute
• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• Like boats & science?… this might be the artist’s residency for you!
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Hedgehogs, Raccoons, and Urbanite Biophilia
• Skeptoid podcast on Colony Collapse Disorder
• Alternative music legend Morrissey agrees to adopt 2 million feral cats in win-win for felines, Australian native fauna
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• “Science: A Candle in the Dark” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the return of five-lined skinks
• Lev Ginzburg Fest: celebration of a “retirement”
• Mist net photographs as art?
• Charismatic megafauna offer protection to their less appealing heterospecifics
• Should we compromise with nations that hunt whales?
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• Can good design make highways less of a problem?
• Carrying capacity — but not growth rate — varies with habitat quality (at least for moose)
• So much for the big-brained city bird theory?
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on big animals in big cities
• New article in Science provides a comprehensive overview and update on Yellowstone National Park
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• Understanding the cascading effect of carnivore loss… before we lose all the carnivores
• Why socially-progressive scientists should not make bets…
• Cod gone on Cape Cod
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• Would a different term make us better appreciate ecosystem services?
• With all we know, we still know too little to reliably re-engineer ecosystems
• New evidence of whooping crane culture on the rebound
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Rob Nixon on Rachel Carson’s prescience
• Are the Sentinelese the last untouched hunter-gatherer culture?
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• Fences exclude invasive predators, give aid to threatened Hawaiian birds
• High tech ad hoc fixes face off against good old-fashioned prevention in the Baltic Sea
• Leaving with empty hands, should Rio+20 participants nonetheless leave with a sense of optimism?
• The ecological impacts of the BP-Deepwater Horizon oil spill quantified
• Condors, hunters, and the National Rifle Association
• Should conservation scientists also be advocates for particular policies?
• Is this what free-market conservation looks like?
• Kandyan dwarf toad removes itself from the IUCN Red List
• Brian Czech warns ecologists against drinking the “sustainable growth Koolaid”
• Can environmentalists and the religious faithful work together to preserve creation?
• Conservation Biology that acknowledges that we can never go back
• Can cod come back?
• Molly H. Adams earns top honors from the Critical and Visual Studies program
• 2012 Sustainability Crash Course at Pratt Institute
• Saving Puffins, One Clip at a Time
• Are Eco-labels an Effective Tool for Conservation?
• Official video of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010
• 2010 Convention on Biological Diversity and Ecosystem Services (Sorta)
• National Geographic “Wolf Wars”
• The Cove

Convergence (6)

• Support the mighty Bombardier Beetle’s quest to have its genome sequenced!
• An eye is not an eye is not an eye
• Our culture is special, but not especially uncommon
• Hawaiian crickets converge on the same solution to eavesdropping parasites
• “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” exhibit at the American Museum on Natural History
• National Geographic “Fatal Attraction”

Cooperation (157)

• STEAMplant project brings local primary school kids to Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden
• SSE tells HHS to acknowledge sex and gender diversity
• A cool (new-ish) IPD game theory simulator!
• Scientific American drops special issue on “Science of Being Human”
• Mom: “Eat my sh*t and then help your younger siblings”
• Mom leaves, offspring get buff and work together
• All it takes to get a little specialized is a small increase in group size…
• Professor Jensen’s Guide to Urban Cycling
• My entry on the evolution of play will be added to the massive Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science
• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• NPR features Christopher Boehm on the love-hate relationship we have people in power
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• Arming the Donkeys on kids, parenting, and Burning Man
• FDA investigators raid American Society of Human Genetics offices in Carl Zimmer cloning case
• America Society of Primatologists condemns H. A. and Margret Rey, calls for Curious George boycott
• Great conversation at my Columbia University Population Biology Seminar talk
• Dan Ariely’s “Arming the Donkeys” podcast
• Food is personal, sometimes ethical, but rarely political
• Understanding [culture + multilevel selection] = potential for Sustainability
• Would a “labor economy” lead to different outcomes than the “capital economy”?
• Clever study shows how cooperative bacteria sanction — and therefore exclude — cheaters
• Can understanding cooperation lead to higher-yield crops?
• How much impact can a set of free game theory infographics have?
• Crucial climate talks in Paris take place in a socially repressive environment
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• Maybe infants don’t really care who helps and who hinders after all…
• Fascinating and clever study of how personal contact norms vary by relationship
• Jonathan Haidt on the business advantage of being ethical
• That beard and deep voice may be to put him in his place, not attract her
• China shifts a failed cultural policy designed to stabilize population
• Major masts made by multiplicative modification
• Group phenotypic composition: implications for individuals and their groups
• David Sloan Wilson on how Jeff Bezos don’t know squat about chickens (or evolution!)
• Malcolm Gladwell on the social contagion of mass shootings
• Like-with-like assortment plus exponential fitness increases cooperation, even under weak selection
• Should we compromise with nations that hunt whales?
• My testimonial for Gregory Tague’s “Evolution and Human Culture”
• The often-large difference between “breeding” and “parenting”
• New report on drug resistance highlights the tragedy of our antibiotics commons
• Does the ability to accumulate wealth make us value the future more?
• Formation of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution has the potential to catalyze research into how culture evolves
• Asymmetrical interaction best explained by superrational rather than rational strategy
• Have we outgrown the scale of cooperation supported by the Big Gods of Big Religion?
• The most fundamental way in which culture pushes against biology
• Rule number one of cooperative bacterial warfare? Be in the majority.
• Music, the cortisone balm?
• Should altruism have an effect on your final exam score?
• Explaining the evolutionary explanation for handedness
• Evolution beyond adaptation: a critical step for evolutionary theory
• Can we resolve the ‘group selection debate’ by focusing on human cooperation?
• Is the threat of regulation enough to incentivize cooperation from nitrogen polluters?
• In the end, climate compromise comes down to writing and editing
• How stupid professorial attitudes towards Wikipedia are making students less savvy
• E&E in A&D: The Armstrong Lie
• Our paper on a super-rational solution to the tragedy of the commons published in Scientific Reports
• The forces of cultural evolution push hard on political humor
• Review of What We Made by Tom Finkelpearl
• Water, Alfalfa, China, and a modern Tragedy of the Commons
• Do humans form genetically similar social groups independent of kinship?
• Do cancer cells play cooperate in the Prisoner’s Dilemma?
• My Evolution 2014 talk is on YouTube
• Evolution 2014: Day 2
• Evolution 2014: Are island mutualist communities more likely to be nested because they are inherently more unstable?
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Evolution 2014: Evolution of cooperation in the high school classroom? You bet!
• Cath Dennis publishes non-computerized classroom adaptation of Axelrod’s iPD Tournament
• Donald Trump saves CitiBike, proving that selfishness and cooperation are no longer opposed
• Model evidence that third party punishment only makes sense in tight-knit groups
• How understanding social evolution might help treat cancer
• Was Teilhard de Chardin the real inventor of an evolutionary approach to culture?
• New edited volume joins the growing collection of literature dedicated to how cooperation evolves
• In bird reproduction, parasitism and cooperation coevolve
• CNN tackles climate change by explaining public goods games!
• Money Talking about Janet Yellen and multilevel selection
• Can you replicate the collective adaptive value of religion without god?
• Writing and record-keeping as important tools in the evolution of large-scale human cooperation
• Does self organization of social networks foster cooperation in the face of cheating?
• New research suggests that chimpanzees understand that cooperation produces benefits
• Microbes may surf their way to successful cooperation
• An anecdote that illustrates the tremendous power of human network reciprocity
• A tour of your diverse microbiome, and the things that might deplete that diversity
• More press for paper that de-bunks the zero determinant superiority
• My review of “Origins of Altruism and Cooperation” is published in QRB
• Ethnocentric cooperation dominates humanitarian cooperation in the computer… so why does humanitarianism persist?
• Cooperative child-rearing pays dividends for ruffed lemurs, irrespective of kinship
• National Geographic “The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion”
• Think the Milgram Experiments tell us something definitive about human nature? Think again!
• Zero determinant strategy is just another short-term adaptation
• Mammal monogamy still a mystery, but maybe more than a numbers game
• Embarking on a grand experiment in conceptual teaching
• The benefits of a maintaining a relatively small in-group
• A spatial version of the Traveler’s Dilemma allows cooperation to persist
• Just in case you missed it the first ten times: E.O. Wilson likes group selection, Jerry Coyne does not
• Allen MacNeill predicts resolution of Ev-Coop debates
• Martin Nowak to lecture on the compatibility of god and the evolutionary process
• Understanding kin selection and reciprocity when strategies are culturally propagated
• Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
• “Earth Hour” seeks to re-focus our attention on all the earth provides
• Forward on Climate Rally seeks to shift the national dialogue on anthropogenic climate change
• Brief NYT article on empathy in children
• Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
• Montreal art installation rewards cooperative play with musical novelty
• Barash not so enlightening on the paradox of human homosexuality
• Freeman Dyson wins the contest, and then says the contest is stupid
• NPR provides a quick overview of the human drive to reciprocate
• New evidence that economic cooperation existed between Vikings and Inuit
• Further evidence that Hamilton was wrong about eusocial insects
• Making the formation of social networks more realistic also makes them more cooperative
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• Megan Frederickson shares the wonder of ant cooperation with Toronto Library patrons
• International Symposium honors the work of Lynn Margulis
• On becoming a psychopath
• Freeman Dyson calls the Prisoner’s Dilemma “an amusing toy”
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• Can neuroeconomics help economics become a real science?
• Enforcing norms may be for personal gain, not to maintain social order (at least amongst Santa Barbara undergraduates)
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• Can proper education allow reputation to foster action on climate change?
• Lack of complete transparency presents an obstacle but not a block to cooperation
• Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, cannot triangulate punishment
• What’s ironic is that the creationists do not realize that we evolutionists might be trying to understand their success
• Agent-based modeling instead of game theory: I agree!
• Punishment, properly rewarded, can promote cooperation without corruption
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• Despite great press for Dyson, the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is still not the solution to human cooperation
• Bacterial societies defy selfish gene predictions
• “School of Life” acknowledges the values in religion worth preserving
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• Infographic signs on the road to game theory understanding
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• Preview of the 2012 Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Experimental study of cooperation and population structure calls into question the importance of heterogeneity
• Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics hosts conference on the role of cooperation in major evolutionary transitions
• Additional theoretical study insists that population structure does promote cooperation
• Matthew Zimmerman on how international relations views the evolution of groups
• If your loners are truly loners they won’t punish, and cooperation thrives even in the presence of antisocial punishment
• Larry Arnhart on Singer, Bowles, and Gintis and Darwinian libertarianism
• A victory for collective action and national cooperation
• Antibiotic overuse: a porcine tragedy of the commons
• Perhaps nestedness is just an artifact of ecological opportunity (and not stability)
• Jerry Coyne refutes the E.O. Wilson NYT piece
• A new salvo in the punishment wars: if everyone can punish, defectors triumph
• Call it “ethnocentrism” or the “green beard effect”, “tags” assist cooperation
• Sometimes our simulations have more to tell than we first see
• A final solution to the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma?
• Wasps can recognize each other, by face
• Peter Turchin on Steven Pinker’s “Grand Deception” hypotheses
• Steven Pinker makes it clear that he is not a “group selectionist”
• Are the population dynamics of Dupont’s lark dictated by multilevel selective pressures?
• Once again Jerry Coyne goes ad hominem to defend evolutionary orthodoxy
• Bird study suggests that multilevel selection theory is necessary to understand population dynamics
• Music evolves (culturally!) from noise to song under the influence of human selection
• Nice summary piece on the state of research into human nature and morality by Agustín Fuentes
• Tim Birkenhead on anthropomorphism and animal emotion
• David Barash illuminates the “EvoPolitics” of Darwin’s time
• Understanding the role of the Templeton Foundation in funding evolutionary biology research
• Preschoolers cooperatively rock chimps in puzzle tournament
• Prominent evolutionary biologists weigh in on whether humans can evolve into a ‘superorganism’
• A competitive nominee in the “weirdest YouTube video about a theoretical biology paper” category
• Gerald Carter produces an informative video on cooperation in vampire bats
• Familiarity breeds… mutual aid (at least in some birds)
• Interesting reports from the Consilience Conference
• Do you need cooperation in your model to explain why there are more right-handed people?
• Once your subject becomes a continuing education class…
• Scientific American “Why We Help”
• July issue of Scientific American will feature a cover story on the evolution of cooperation
• “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” exhibit at the American Museum on Natural History
• Elinor Ostrom, pioneering social scientist and scholar of cooperation, is dead at 78
• “EvoLudo” site provides tutorials on evolutionary games related to cooperation
• “Evolution and Games” site provides tutorials on cooperation theory
• Vampire bats: the ideal organism for studying cooperation?
• NY Times provides perspective on E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• PNAS paper explores the role of population structure in facilitating reciprocity
• Richard Dawkins on E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• David Sloan Wilson on Richard Dawkins on E.O. Wilson
• Understanding the effects of asymmetry and relatedness on social volunteerism
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project launches with its first release of graphic packages
• There are plenty of organs out there: more altruism would end the social dilemma of who gets available organs
• Economic Whales and their Parasites
• Larry Arnhart reviews E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• David Sloan Wilson differentiates “Evolutionary Religious Studies” from “The New Atheism”
• Social Evolution Forum takes on role of social networking in human cooperation
• Why don’t other animals make better use of punishment?
• Richard Sennett’s “Together” explores the history of cooperative rituals
• National Academies Press releases proceedings for “Cooperation and Conflict” colloquium
• “Open Yale” course provides the fundamentals of Game Theory for free
• James K. Galbraith makes the connection between debt policy and social stability
• Short interview with Mark Pagel in The Guardian
• Are dolphins on their way to domesticating humans?
• I am not the only one who likes to narrowly interpret creative works through my scientific lens
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: Ultimatum Game “conceptual” images
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First “sequence” images
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: New “conceptual” images
• What kind of in-group does Facebook represent?
• Is the European Union going rogue or playing altruist on airline emissions?
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First “examples” matrices
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First images
• Howard Rheingold TED talk urges a global movement to study cooperation
• Science in Art & Design: Justin Taylor’s “The Gospel of Anarchy”
• Costly signalling not so costly in the presence of comrades
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Eco-mysticism in the Ecology Classroom, Discontinuity in Evolutionary Theory
• Naturalistic Fallacy: 1, Sam Harris: 0
• Patterns in mussel beds may reflect interaction between individual behavior and emergent environmental patterns
• How the right wing co-opts research into the evolution of cooperation
• Rand and Nowak paper on antisocial punishment in public goods games
• Is humanity’s most dangerous technology debt?
• Martin Nowak lecture on The Evolution of Cooperation at MIT
• If Only Game Designers Were Scientists
• Understanding Rupert Murdoch from an Evolutionary Perspective
• Mexican Culture and Collective Action
• Economics and Human Satisfaction
• Easy-IPD version 1.0 released!
• Barash and Lipton on Bin Laden (and Us)
• “A Paradise Built in Hell” by Rebecca Solnit
• Contemporary Human Cooperation With Non-Kin Probably No Mistake
• Computer-Based Tools for Teaching about Robert Axelrod’s Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• In the Light of Evolution V: Cooperation (January 7th)
• In the Light of Evolution V: Cooperation (An Abbreviated and Incomplete Social Network Analysis of the Speakers)
• Robert Trivers and colleagues on Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson’s “The evolution of eusociality”
• Firefighting and the Tragedy of the Commons
• The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution
• Do you still think God is good?
• Teaching evolution and game theory, simultaneously
• Darwin’s Cathedral versus The God Delusion
• The Quest for the Perfect Hive
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – Mutualistic Networks Symposium
• Human Adaptation and Happiness
• Common Ground Symposium at Columbia University

Cooperative Breeding (2)

• Evolution 2014: Day 2
• In bird reproduction, parasitism and cooperation coevolve

Course Evaluations (6)

• An analysis of my course evaluations (Spring 2019)
• What in Darwin’s name was I thinking? (#001)
• An analysis of my course evaluations for Spring 2016
• Are there better ways of using course evaluations?
• An analysis of my course evaluations for Spring 2015
• My decision to make my course evaluations public

Course Readings (2)

• Embarking on a grand experiment in conceptual teaching
• Moving away from textbooks

Courses (1)

• An analysis of my course evaluations (Spring 2019)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2019)
• When it comes to considering sex and gender, don’t forget sex determination
• My entry on the evolution of play will be added to the massive Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science
• I will present my EnviroAtlas class activities at NCSE 2018
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2017)
• Deep Look on nutrient transport by salmon
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2017)
• What in Darwin’s name was I thinking? (#001)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2016)
• My ecological footprint for 2016-2017
• An analysis of my course evaluations for Spring 2016
• Biophotovoltaics: a promising design innovation, or a great example of lack of quantitative design?
• A potentially interesting Evolution of Play documentary
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2016)
• Where’s the world’s biggest solar-electric power station going to be located?
• What can be made by mimicking biological “assemblies”?
• My ecological footprint for 2015-2016
• Why are architects required to take a course focused on ecology and environmental science?
• Eco 101: Carrying Capacity
• End: Sabbatical; Resume: Teaching
• Is New York City a “sustainable” metropolis?
• Personalized DNA tests likely to provide further evidence of human inter-connectedness
• What deficiencies in sound perception reveal about how we perceive sound
• To be an effective critical theorist of science, it helps to understand science
• Are technological optimists too optimistic about technological sustainability?
• Maybe infants don’t really care who helps and who hinders after all…
• The problem with same sex attraction “for the good of the species”
• Fascinating and clever study of how personal contact norms vary by relationship
• That beard and deep voice may be to put him in his place, not attract her
• What’s the evolved function of curiosity?
• Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
• Why the “just burn it all” approach to ending fossil fuel dependence does not work
• Charismatic megafauna offer protection to their less appealing heterospecifics
• Urbanization is not urbanization: density, not size, drives sustainability
• Should altruism have an effect on your final exam score?
• Explaining the evolutionary explanation for handedness
• An analysis of my course evaluations for Spring 2015
• My new favorite concept mapping activity: depicting whole-system ecological flows
• New article in Science provides a comprehensive overview and update on Yellowstone National Park
• My ecological footprint for 2014-2015
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• An anecdote that illustrates the tremendous power of human network reciprocity
• How will I deliver conceptual understanding?
• Embarking on a grand experiment in conceptual teaching
• Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno
• Concept mapping as a creative tool
• Peacocks communicate via the (ultra)sounds they make with their feathers
• Eco-mysticism in the Ecology Classroom, Discontinuity in Evolutionary Theory
• Online tools for teaching the basics of population growth
• Using Ecological Footprints to Teach Sustainability
• National Geographic’s “Science of Dogs”
• Firefighting and the Tragedy of the Commons
• The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution
• National Geographic “Wolf Wars”
• Sourcing sources of selection
• Teaching evolution and game theory, simultaneously
• Understanding biome-level response to climate change
• National Geographic “Fatal Attraction”

Creationism (6)

• Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson liberated after month-long kidnapping ordeal
• My personal experience that creationists gravitate to anything with even the faintest scent of scientific uncertainty (and what to do about it)
• Evolution 2014: Want to teach both sides? Have your students deconstruct creationist propaganda!
• Evolution 2014: A clever way to see if creationist students understand evolutionary concepts
• What’s ironic is that the creationists do not realize that we evolutionists might be trying to understand their success
• Great Michael Ruse piece on the politics of resisting religious encroachment on evolutionary biology

Creative Commons (1)

• Is this site good enough to clone?

Critical and Visual Studies program (2)

• Darwin in social context? Ric Brown’s fascinating survey of some important contemporaries
• Molly H. Adams earns top honors from the Critical and Visual Studies program

Critiques, Reviews, & Surveys (1)

• How will the COVID-19 crisis affect action on climate change?
• I will be participating in the 2019 NCEP Teaching & Learning Studio
• A cool (new-ish) IPD game theory simulator!
• Humans arrive, other mammals shrink
• What might we discover in the ocean twilight zone?
• Can a realistically-parameterized model tell us why our brains are so big?
• Alan Rabinowitz, 1953-2018
• My entry on the evolution of play will be added to the massive Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science
• PBS’ Deep Look on Firefly communication and deception
• Deep Look on nutrient transport by salmon
• “Mount H-Index”: I never made it to base camp, and I have still had some great adventures
• Who was the first to catalog color? Hint: it wasn’t designers!
• Fantastic piece on nature/nurture by Patrick F. Clarkin in TVOL
• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• My review of new edited Trophic Ecology book out in the Quarterly Review of Biology
• Pratt News features short piece on Dr. Roland Kays’s campus visit
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Hedgehogs, Raccoons, and Urbanite Biophilia
• NPR features Christopher Boehm on the love-hate relationship we have people in power
• Another great Skeptoid episode, this one on race
• Skeptoid podcast on Colony Collapse Disorder
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• 2016 Sustainability Summit live on Pratt’s Video Site
• Julia Buntaine explores the potential power of art and science collaborations
• Want to know where NYC’s water supply stands? There’s a DEP page for that!
• Maybe human impacts aren’t so dramatic (when experienced from the geologic time scale)
• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• An inspiring summit, but big challenges at home and afar…
• Arming the Donkeys on kids, parenting, and Burning Man
• My article on adolescence featured in the This View of Life culture series
• Pratt students make the potential trip to Mars better designed
• Biophotovoltaics: a promising design innovation, or a great example of lack of quantitative design?
• Pratt Foundation teams up with Brooklyn College pyschologists to study perception and drawing
• You can check out my first Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk (at St. Francis College) on YouTube
• What can be made by mimicking biological “assemblies”?
• Like to forage for mushrooms? Beware the Amanita!
• “This is the Nature of Cities” podcast on urban bees and civic ecology
• “Science: A Candle in the Dark” podcast on Urban Ecology
• “In Defense of Plants” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Dan Ariely’s “Arming the Donkeys” podcast
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the return of five-lined skinks
• What do we know about Cultural Transmission?
• An eye is not an eye is not an eye
• Food is personal, sometimes ethical, but rarely political
• How do we know when people are actually happy?
• Is New York City a “sustainable” metropolis?
• Understanding [culture + multilevel selection] = potential for Sustainability
• Injury intuition confirmation bias? Farce article goes really viral
• Would a “labor economy” lead to different outcomes than the “capital economy”?
• Clever study shows how cooperative bacteria sanction — and therefore exclude — cheaters
• Can understanding cooperation lead to higher-yield crops?
• How the built environment influences our ability to sustain personal and environmental commitments
• Personalized DNA tests likely to provide further evidence of human inter-connectedness
• My personal experience that creationists gravitate to anything with even the faintest scent of scientific uncertainty (and what to do about it)
• Lev Ginzburg Fest: celebration of a “retirement”
• What deficiencies in sound perception reveal about how we perceive sound
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• To be an effective critical theorist of science, it helps to understand science
• Are technological optimists too optimistic about technological sustainability?
• Primates — but not their rodent relatives — can infer the effects of other individuals on resource availability
• Higher education teaching loads are about economics, not valuing teaching
• Jeremy Yoder on contemporary selection for increased human height
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• Maybe infants don’t really care who helps and who hinders after all…
• The problem with same sex attraction “for the good of the species”
• Fascinating and clever study of how personal contact norms vary by relationship
• Jonathan Haidt on the business advantage of being ethical
• That beard and deep voice may be to put him in his place, not attract her
• Review of William B. Provine’s “The ‘Random Genetic Drift’ Fallacy”
• Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
• China shifts a failed cultural policy designed to stabilize population
• Major masts made by multiplicative modification
• Group phenotypic composition: implications for individuals and their groups
• Does the rapid spread of a culture of over-exploitation intensify our impact on wild food sources?
• Are parasites really ecologically necessary?
• Shark attacks are down, but you still have to make good decisions out there on the ocean
• While we vacuum the seas, we may as well clean them of debris…
• Cargo ships a major source of NOx emissions
• Why the “just burn it all” approach to ending fossil fuel dependence does not work
• Mist net photographs as art?
• Charismatic megafauna offer protection to their less appealing heterospecifics
• Urbanization is not urbanization: density, not size, drives sustainability
• David Sloan Wilson on how Jeff Bezos don’t know squat about chickens (or evolution!)
• Does Bayesian bias aid us in making adaptive distorted self-assessments?
• W.W. Norton’s new InQuizitive partner to the Bergstrom and Dugatkin Evolution textbook
• Malcolm Gladwell on the social contagion of mass shootings
• What open access evangelists often miss about the task at hand
• Without sustainability in our diets, we won’t be sustainable
• Is technological evolution “de-agglomerating” cultural innovation?
• ECOmotion Studios on Huffaker’s crazy experiments to make prey and predators coexist
• ECOmotion Studios on Simberloff & Wilson’s island biogeography experiments
• ECOmotion Studios on Hairston Smith Slobodkin and why the earth is green
• EcoMotion studios celebrates Robert Paine’s Pisaster experiments
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on synanthropes and urban island castaways
• Like-with-like assortment plus exponential fitness increases cooperation, even under weak selection
• Should we compromise with nations that hunt whales?
• My testimonial for Gregory Tague’s “Evolution and Human Culture”
• The often-large difference between “breeding” and “parenting”
• Anne-Marie Slaughter on the tradeoff between work and caregiving
• New report on drug resistance highlights the tragedy of our antibiotics commons
• Open Tree of Life allows experts and novices alike to explore “the” phylogeny
• Do creative people have “messy minds”?
• Does the ability to accumulate wealth make us value the future more?
• Are big corporate polluters trying to “artwash” their image?
• When it comes to sex, we are consumately proximate
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• Asymmetrical interaction best explained by superrational rather than rational strategy
• Our culture is special, but not especially uncommon
• Can good design make highways less of a problem?
• Have we outgrown the scale of cooperation supported by the Big Gods of Big Religion?
• The most fundamental way in which culture pushes against biology
• Rule number one of cooperative bacterial warfare? Be in the majority.
• Music, the cortisone balm?
• Should altruism have an effect on your final exam score?
• Carrying capacity — but not growth rate — varies with habitat quality (at least for moose)
• Go mutualistic or go home?
• Explaining the evolutionary explanation for handedness
• WmD Episode #00002 has been released
• So much for the big-brained city bird theory?
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on big animals in big cities
• Rivers, Lakes, Seas, and Environmental Justice
• Evolution beyond adaptation: a critical step for evolutionary theory
• Court Ruling in the Netherlands may point the way to cracking the climate compliance conundrum
• Zoonosis, Ebola, and the Elusive Reservoir Host
• A niche with the masses?
• Can we resolve the ‘group selection debate’ by focusing on human cooperation?
• In the end, climate compromise comes down to writing and editing
• New article in Science provides a comprehensive overview and update on Yellowstone National Park
• On the verge of 400 ppm Carbon Dioxide: a symbolic threshold
• PCB Bioaccumulation and Polar Bear Penises
• E&E in A&D: Genetic profiling as art?
• Our paper on a super-rational solution to the tragedy of the commons published in Scientific Reports
• My review of the “Encyclopedia of Theoretical Ecology” published in QRB
• Review of What We Made by Tom Finkelpearl
• Water, Alfalfa, China, and a modern Tragedy of the Commons
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• Ben Knight’s “Phyletic gradualism / Punctuated equilibrium”
• A nice synopsis of some reasons for laughter
• Choosing a more sustainable web host
• Do humans form genetically similar social groups independent of kinship?
• Do cancer cells play cooperate in the Prisoner’s Dilemma?
• My Evolution 2014 talk is on YouTube
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Hawaiian crickets converge on the same solution to eavesdropping parasites
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• John Oliver holds first “balanced” climate debate on television
• Cath Dennis publishes non-computerized classroom adaptation of Axelrod’s iPD Tournament
• Our review paper on Late Pleistocene Extinction Modeling published in QRB!
• Apparently I should stop holding my breath for the Google Translate “dolphin” module
• Is “nest parasitism” really “nest mutualism”?
• 0.5% to 3%: Do we now have a better sense of what makes people smart?
• David Haig suggests that babies cry at night to prevent siblings
• Donald Trump saves CitiBike, proving that selfishness and cooperation are no longer opposed
• Cognitive Ethology and Cat Companionship
• Interesting numbers on the sustainability (or lack thereof) of the aviation industry
• If sloths endure costs to maintain closed-loop agricultural systems, why can’t we?
• Do we need to delete to keep the web sustainable?
• String Theory: should we care?
• Okay, I admit it: I am a bit of a Neanderthal
• Model evidence that third party punishment only makes sense in tight-knit groups
• How understanding social evolution might help treat cancer
• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• Was Teilhard de Chardin the real inventor of an evolutionary approach to culture?
• Understanding the cascading effect of carnivore loss… before we lose all the carnivores
• Why socially-progressive scientists should not make bets…
• Cod gone on Cape Cod
• Concentrated factory farming of livestock massively alters the phosphorus cycle
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• In bird reproduction, parasitism and cooperation coevolve
• Curiosity and culturomics
• Are MOOCs just the clunky starting place for a more evolved form of new teaching?
• CNN tackles climate change by explaining public goods games!
• Now legal, Northern California’s pot farms join the rest of agriculture in impacting water supply
• Money Talking about Janet Yellen and multilevel selection
• Nice infographic on global and domestic food waste
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• Can you replicate the collective adaptive value of religion without god?
• Would a different term make us better appreciate ecosystem services?
• Caterpillars weaponize nicotine
• Taking risks for the data
• “Brainchildren” — another way to conceptualize our devotion to cultural fitness
• Are MOOCs and the arts incompatible?
• Barash the gene accountant on that little economic driver called “reproduction”
• Does self organization of social networks foster cooperation in the face of cheating?
• New research suggests that chimpanzees understand that cooperation produces benefits
• Microbes may surf their way to successful cooperation
• Open Access publishing and “peer review” fail the test of a well-designed hoax
• An amazing indictment of the academic publishing industry (in which most of us participate)
• Should we emulate the cooperative and conservative habits of the sloth?
• Recognizing the difference between what the big and small educational institutions offer
• An anecdote that illustrates the tremendous power of human network reciprocity
• Additional evidence that obesity may be due to environment, not just habits
• A tour of your diverse microbiome, and the things that might deplete that diversity
• With all we know, we still know too little to reliably re-engineer ecosystems
• More press for paper that de-bunks the zero determinant superiority
• My review of “Origins of Altruism and Cooperation” is published in QRB
• New evidence of whooping crane culture on the rebound
• Cooperative child-rearing pays dividends for ruffed lemurs, irrespective of kinship
• National Geographic “The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion”
• Think the Milgram Experiments tell us something definitive about human nature? Think again!
• Sarah Coakley on the connection between theology and evolutionary theory
• Zero determinant strategy is just another short-term adaptation
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Mammal monogamy still a mystery, but maybe more than a numbers game
• Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno
• Isabella Rossellini tackles motherhood without human pretense
• New theory explaining the prevalence of homosexuality focuses on epigenetics
• Ever wonder about the swimming pattern of sperm?
• The potential for human evolution has increased along with the population size of our species
• Great NPR piece on how simple it would be for us to reduce carbon emissions
• The benefits of a maintaining a relatively small in-group
• Pratt Professor Ágnes Mócsy releases “Smashing Matters” short film
• NPR piece suggests that economics are pushing us towards nutrient recycling
• My review of Railsback and Grimm’s “Agent-based and individual-based modeling” textbook published in Ecology
• Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
• Seth Horowitz on our perception of sound
• Quantifying the climate value of that 40-acre woodlot
• Up-Goer Five text editor challenges you to make accessible explanations
• Green port policies yield big decreases in the ecological footprint of shipping
• As the nature of university-level teaching changes, should we re-assess the credit hour?
• Dog license dataset opens up huge potential for understanding the dog-human mutualism
• Brief NYT article on empathy in children
• Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
• Production on marginal lands can meet only 25% of our biofuel mandates
• Roberts Publishing releases an iPad version of their majors Evolution textbook
• Montreal art installation rewards cooperative play with musical novelty
• If your “free will” is questionable, feel free to exercise your “free won’t”
• Do our brains require endurance activity in order to function?
• Barash not so enlightening on the paradox of human homosexuality
• Multiple Intelligences theory gets some neuroscientific support
• Charlotte Douglas International Airport employs worms to close the loop on airport waste
• Freeman Dyson wins the contest, and then says the contest is stupid
• Fracking study retracted after the discovery of a massive conflict of interest
• G. Kim Blank on making writing work better by eliminating the term paper
• NPR provides a quick overview of the human drive to reciprocate
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• New evidence that economic cooperation existed between Vikings and Inuit
• National Geographic feature on penguin propulsion
• Does American faith in genetic determinism limit the achievement of our students?
• Further evidence that Hamilton was wrong about eusocial insects
• Making the formation of social networks more realistic also makes them more cooperative
• Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
• Slate article explores the big brain, big society connection
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• Chronicle of Higher Education feature explores the question of why more women do not succeed in science
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• Michael Ruse on James Lovelock’s Gaia of 2012
• Ready for eugenics 2.0?
• International Symposium honors the work of Lynn Margulis
• On becoming a psychopath
• Rogue iron fertilization? Things have gotten weird!
• Freeman Dyson calls the Prisoner’s Dilemma “an amusing toy”
• New PNAS special issue explores the developmental effects of early social environment
• Rob Nixon on Rachel Carson’s prescience
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• Barry Commoner, pioneering scientist and environmentalist, is dead at 95
• Enforcing norms may be for personal gain, not to maintain social order (at least amongst Santa Barbara undergraduates)
• Think that the DNA transfer is only from parents to offspring? Think again!
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• Some conservatives actually see the public health and economic dilemmas posed by greenhouse gas emissions
• Can proper education allow reputation to foster action on climate change?
• Lack of complete transparency presents an obstacle but not a block to cooperation
• Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, cannot triangulate punishment
• What’s ironic is that the creationists do not realize that we evolutionists might be trying to understand their success
• Agent-based modeling instead of game theory: I agree!
• Punishment, properly rewarded, can promote cooperation without corruption
• Want a good gauge of how much humans pollute waterways? Just measure for caffeine!
• The humble Mistletoe turns out to be a probable keystone species
• Climate and Clean Air Coalition unites air pollution concerns
• Reductions in fertilizer use are now worth carbon credits
• Does anthropogenic change make natives into invaders?
• Are the Sentinelese the last untouched hunter-gatherer culture?
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• Despite great press for Dyson, the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is still not the solution to human cooperation
• Rachel Carson still under attack for bringing her values to bear on her science
• Rebranding global warming as a health threat
• Bacterial societies defy selfish gene predictions
• “School of Life” acknowledges the values in religion worth preserving
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• Would online data repositories solve the problem of scientific fraud?
• My review of “How Species Interact” published in Ecological Modelling
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• ESA 2012 Workshop #8, Getting off the Ground with Individual-Based Modeling: A Primer for Instructors and Researchers
• Preview of the 2012 Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon
• If your loners are truly loners they won’t punish, and cooperation thrives even in the presence of antisocial punishment
• Perhaps nestedness is just an artifact of ecological opportunity (and not stability)
• Call it “ethnocentrism” or the “green beard effect”, “tags” assist cooperation
• Sometimes our simulations have more to tell than we first see
• A final solution to the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma?
• Robert Krulwich on the value of telling stories about science
• On Being features David Sloan Wilson
• Daniel Dennett on Darwin and Turing’s “strange inversion of reasoning”
• Evolution may be too slow: British Columbia begins assisted migration of forests
• National Geographic’s “If They Could Only Talk” considers Easter Island’s many mysteries
• Peter Turchin on Steven Pinker’s “Grand Deception” hypotheses
• Steven Pinker makes it clear that he is not a “group selectionist”
• Are the population dynamics of Dupont’s lark dictated by multilevel selective pressures?
• Once again Jerry Coyne goes ad hominem to defend evolutionary orthodoxy
• Tim Birkenhead on anthropomorphism and animal emotion
• David Barash illuminates the “EvoPolitics” of Darwin’s time
• Great Michael Ruse piece on the politics of resisting religious encroachment on evolutionary biology
• Ted Kaczynski as a scholar of resistance to technology
• Understanding the role of the Templeton Foundation in funding evolutionary biology research
• Preschoolers cooperatively rock chimps in puzzle tournament
• Prominent evolutionary biologists weigh in on whether humans can evolve into a ‘superorganism’
• Is this what free-market conservation looks like?
• Mutualistic fungus transfers nitrogen from parasitized insects to its plant host
• North Carolina legislators enact strict law limiting the rate of natural change
• Gerald Carter produces an informative video on cooperation in vampire bats
• Familiarity breeds… mutual aid (at least in some birds)
• Interesting reports from the Consilience Conference
• Do you need cooperation in your model to explain why there are more right-handed people?
• Scientific American “Why We Help”
• There is no doubt that there are conservation trade-offs associated with the proliferation of wind power
• Is a comic movie about getting a Ph.D. revealing of some scientific tragedies?
• Self-castration sometimes turns out to be good for reproductive success
• Kandyan dwarf toad removes itself from the IUCN Red List
• Longer telomeres imparted by older fathers may forestall senescence
• Brian Czech warns ecologists against drinking the “sustainable growth Koolaid”
• Honey bees harbor a remarkably diverse community of mutualistic gut microbes
• Lyme disease extensification may have more to do with foxes than deer
• Peacocks communicate via the (ultra)sounds they make with their feathers
• Is Alzheimer’s disease caused by prion proliferation?
• PBS short profiles Pratt Institute
• “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” exhibit at the American Museum on Natural History
• Our brains are too smart to be tricked: diet sodas just make your body crave more calories
• In case you were a skeptic: bears can count
• Surprisingly, rugby can be used to understand honest signaling
• Aquatic food chains have gotten longer and less diverse over evolutionary time
• Mesocosm experiment considers the effects of human modification of community structure
• New study on birds uses remote tracking to provide detailed behavioral data
• Big felines have lots of commensal fans
• A comparison of behaviorally-based animal diseases reminds us of the kingdom in which we belong
• New comprehensive data synthesis favors a pluralistic explanation for Eurasian mammoth extinction
• The Australian Government blocks coal mine to protect the Great Barrier Reef
• Now if you could only keep your cytosine methylated you might live forever
• Bonobo sequence establishes that humans are equally but dissimilarly related to our chimpanzee relatives
• Can “muppet theory” help explain behavioral heterogeneity in human social groups?
• Vampire bats: the ideal organism for studying cooperation?
• NY Times provides perspective on E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• PNAS paper explores the role of population structure in facilitating reciprocity
• Richard Dawkins on E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• David Sloan Wilson on Richard Dawkins on E.O. Wilson
• Does climate change have the potential to reduce the stabilizing effects of biodiversity?
• On the Media takes on the problem of scientific integrity in scientific journals and the popular media
• Don’t mistake having a better map for knowing where you are: new technology for sequencing fetal DNA will not lead to serious trait selection
• Joseph E. Stiglitz discusses the economically destabilizing impact of rent-seeking
• Understanding the effects of asymmetry and relatedness on social volunteerism
• There are plenty of organs out there: more altruism would end the social dilemma of who gets available organs
• Economic Whales and their Parasites
• Larry Arnhart reviews E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• Are the most lucrative components of the financial sector parasites on the larger economy?
• How fast do anthropogenic impacts get amplified up the food chain? Ask a bluefin!
• {Canis lupus familiaris + Homo sapiens} versus Homo neanderthalenthis?
• Is the origin of all life the gyre?
• S.E. Gould takes on sloppy use of the selfish gene metaphor
• UCS “Cooler Smarter” footprint calculator promotes lower carbon behaviors
• Paulinella chromatophora’s photosynthetic engine blurs the line between endosymbiont and organelle
• Why don’t other animals make better use of punishment?
• An argument for better Frankensteins (and thus more prudent use of technology)
• Can cod come back?
• I knew that dog was watching me: Jennifer Verdolin confirms my worst fears
• If you don’t think that culture can make us do maladaptive things, check out “trepanning”
• Richard Sennett’s “Together” explores the history of cooperative rituals
• Is the sustainability movement too eco-centric?
• John Horgan reviews Robert Trivers’ “The Folly of Fools”
• James K. Galbraith makes the connection between debt policy and social stability
• BBC covers the up side of the North Pacific plastic “garbage patch”
• Olivia Judson reviews Mark Pagel’s “Wired for Culture”
• NPR drops dumb Bell Curve segment
• What kind of in-group does Facebook represent?
• Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild”
• Is the European Union going rogue or playing altruist on airline emissions?
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• Howard Rheingold TED talk urges a global movement to study cooperation
• Science in Art & Design: Justin Taylor’s “The Gospel of Anarchy”
• Costly signalling not so costly in the presence of comrades
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Naturalistic Fallacy: 1, Sam Harris: 0
• Online tools for teaching the basics of population growth
• A fabulous article on the collective efforts that created the World Wide Web and the corporate efforts to destroy it
• How the right wing co-opts research into the evolution of cooperation
• Rand and Nowak paper on antisocial punishment in public goods games
• Martin Nowak lecture on The Evolution of Cooperation at MIT
• What can Dean Potter teach us about evolution?
• Epigenetics on Leonard Lopate
• Aquaculture on Leonard Lopate
• Mexican Culture and Collective Action
• Economics and Human Satisfaction
• National Geographic “Can China go green?”
• “DNA” by James D. Watson
• Barash and Lipton on Bin Laden (and Us)
• NY Times way behind the times on Nature versus Nurture
• Being Clean Might Make You Allergic
• Sex and Slime on Fresh Air
• “A Paradise Built in Hell” by Rebecca Solnit
• Contemporary Human Cooperation With Non-Kin Probably No Mistake
• Computer-Based Tools for Teaching about Robert Axelrod’s Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• In the Light of Evolution V: Cooperation (January 7th)
• Saving Puffins, One Clip at a Time
• Mirsky on Poop in Space
• Using Ecological Footprints to Teach Sustainability
• Reclaiming a Rigorous Definition of “Sustainability”
• Are Eco-labels an Effective Tool for Conservation?
• Official video of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010
• Delayed Development and Human Evolution
• Greg Graffin on The Takeaway
• National Geographic’s “Science of Dogs”
• 2010 Convention on Biological Diversity and Ecosystem Services (Sorta)
• Robert Trivers and colleagues on Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson’s “The evolution of eusociality”
• Firefighting and the Tragedy of the Commons
• Asian Carp on NPR
• The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution
• National Geographic “Wolf Wars”
• The Cove
• NPR is all up in evolution
• Darwin’s Cathedral versus The God Delusion
• The Quest for the Perfect Hive
• Consilience
• Understanding biome-level response to climate change
• National Geographic “Fatal Attraction”
• Crade-to-Cradle
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – “Big Models” Special Session
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday): Afternoon sessions
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – Mutualistic Networks Symposium
• ESA 2009 Day #1 (Sunday)

CTL Fellows Project (1)

• I will be a 2019-2020 Center for Teaching & Learning Fellow

Cultural Anthropology (19)

• My newest STEAMplant collaboration is “To the Core of Me: A Hike Play”
• Urban Transect Walks: helping your students see the overlap between ecological and social patterns
• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• Stunning archaeological find shocks the Pratt Photography Department
• Another great Skeptoid episode, this one on race
• What do we know about Cultural Transmission?
• Personalized DNA tests likely to provide further evidence of human inter-connectedness
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• Fascinating and clever study of how personal contact norms vary by relationship
• My testimonial for Gregory Tague’s “Evolution and Human Culture”
• Does the ability to accumulate wealth make us value the future more?
• Formation of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution has the potential to catalyze research into how culture evolves
• The benefits of a maintaining a relatively small in-group
• NPR provides a quick overview of the human drive to reciprocate
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• New evidence that economic cooperation existed between Vikings and Inuit
• Are the Sentinelese the last untouched hunter-gatherer culture?
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• Elinor Ostrom, pioneering social scientist and scholar of cooperation, is dead at 78

Cultural Evolution (122)

• Break not the ungulate culture of migration
• Why Artists & Designers need Scientists: Exhibit A
• Fantastic piece on nature/nurture by Patrick F. Clarkin in TVOL
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2017)
• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• I am honored to be part of Moral Sense III
• Another great Skeptoid episode, this one on race
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2016)
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• Maybe human impacts aren’t so dramatic (when experienced from the geologic time scale)
• An inspiring summit, but big challenges at home and afar…
• My article on adolescence featured in the This View of Life culture series
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2016)
• You can check out my first Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk (at St. Francis College) on YouTube
• It’s good to remember how fast things change, culturally & biologically
• FDA investigators raid American Society of Human Genetics offices in Carl Zimmer cloning case
• Great conversation at my Columbia University Population Biology Seminar talk
• My next Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk: Columbia University on March 7th, 2016
• What do we know about Cultural Transmission?
• Emerging Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution releases roadmap document
• Understanding [culture + multilevel selection] = potential for Sustainability
• Is there a trade-off between reproduction and creativity?
• Would a “labor economy” lead to different outcomes than the “capital economy”?
• How the built environment influences our ability to sustain personal and environmental commitments
• It was an honor to talk to St. Francis College!
• My first “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators” talk: next Friday at St. Francis College
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• Crucial climate talks in Paris take place in a socially repressive environment
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• Fascinating and clever study of how personal contact norms vary by relationship
• Jonathan Haidt on the business advantage of being ethical
• Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
• Polygyny: the culture we dislike might not be the culture that is evolutionarily disfavored
• China shifts a failed cultural policy designed to stabilize population
• Does the rapid spread of a culture of over-exploitation intensify our impact on wild food sources?
• David Sloan Wilson on how Jeff Bezos don’t know squat about chickens (or evolution!)
• Malcolm Gladwell on the social contagion of mass shootings
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• Is technological evolution “de-agglomerating” cultural innovation?
• My testimonial for Gregory Tague’s “Evolution and Human Culture”
• The often-large difference between “breeding” and “parenting”
• Anne-Marie Slaughter on the tradeoff between work and caregiving
• New report on drug resistance highlights the tragedy of our antibiotics commons
• Does the ability to accumulate wealth make us value the future more?
• Formation of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution has the potential to catalyze research into how culture evolves
• When it comes to sex, we are consumately proximate
• Our culture is special, but not especially uncommon
• Have we outgrown the scale of cooperation supported by the Big Gods of Big Religion?
• The most fundamental way in which culture pushes against biology
• Explaining the evolutionary explanation for handedness
• Zoonosis, Ebola, and the Elusive Reservoir Host
• Can we resolve the ‘group selection debate’ by focusing on human cooperation?
• Sabbatical, Sweet Sabbatical
• How stupid professorial attitudes towards Wikipedia are making students less savvy
• E&E in A&D: The Armstrong Lie
• The forces of cultural evolution push hard on political humor
• Scientific American down on memorization
• There’s No Such Thing as Qualitative Sustainability
• Was Teilhard de Chardin the real inventor of an evolutionary approach to culture?
• Cod gone on Cape Cod
• Curiosity and culturomics
• Money Talking about Janet Yellen and multilevel selection
• Can you replicate the collective adaptive value of religion without god?
• “Brainchildren” — another way to conceptualize our devotion to cultural fitness
• An anecdote that illustrates the tremendous power of human network reciprocity
• Additional evidence that obesity may be due to environment, not just habits
• My review of “Origins of Altruism and Cooperation” is published in QRB
• New evidence of whooping crane culture on the rebound
• Allen MacNeill predicts resolution of Ev-Coop debates
• Understanding kin selection and reciprocity when strategies are culturally propagated
• NPR provides a quick overview of the human drive to reciprocate
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• New evidence that economic cooperation existed between Vikings and Inuit
• Does American faith in genetic determinism limit the achievement of our students?
• Making the formation of social networks more realistic also makes them more cooperative
• Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• What’s ironic is that the creationists do not realize that we evolutionists might be trying to understand their success
• Are the Sentinelese the last untouched hunter-gatherer culture?
• “School of Life” acknowledges the values in religion worth preserving
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• New evidence for gene-culture evolution in Native Americans
• Mount Everest and the limits of play
• On Being features David Sloan Wilson
• National Geographic feature on “Vanishing Languages”
• Peter Turchin on Steven Pinker’s “Grand Deception” hypotheses
• Steven Pinker makes it clear that he is not a “group selectionist”
• Is sexual practice coevolving with our cultural technologies?
• Music evolves (culturally!) from noise to song under the influence of human selection
• Ted Kaczynski as a scholar of resistance to technology
• Understanding the role of the Templeton Foundation in funding evolutionary biology research
• Jason Collins questions the utility-to-fitness conversion
• Who is the bigger bioterrorist, man or nature?
• Human limits extended one step further as wingsuit diver lands without a parachute
• David Sloan Wilson differentiates “Evolutionary Religious Studies” from “The New Atheism”
• Peter Turchin on the “Dark Side of Cultural Evolution”
• If you don’t think that culture can make us do maladaptive things, check out “trepanning”
• Short interview with Mark Pagel in The Guardian
• Olivia Judson reviews Mark Pagel’s “Wired for Culture”
• Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild”
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• Howard Rheingold TED talk urges a global movement to study cooperation
• Science in Art & Design: Justin Taylor’s “The Gospel of Anarchy”
• Naturalistic Fallacy: 1, Sam Harris: 0
• How the right wing co-opts research into the evolution of cooperation
• Is humanity’s most dangerous technology debt?
• Martin Nowak lecture on The Evolution of Cooperation at MIT
• What can Dean Potter teach us about evolution?
• Understanding Rupert Murdoch from an Evolutionary Perspective
• Mexican Culture and Collective Action
• “A Paradise Built in Hell” by Rebecca Solnit
• Contemporary Human Cooperation With Non-Kin Probably No Mistake
• Cultural Evolution in a Hybrid Society
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• The Role of Technology in Human Evolution
• National Geographic’s “Science of Dogs”
• Firefighting and the Tragedy of the Commons
• NPR is all up in evolution
• The Quest for the Perfect Hive

Data Limitation (14)

• How do we know when people are actually happy?
• Is there a trade-off between reproduction and creativity?
• My personal experience that creationists gravitate to anything with even the faintest scent of scientific uncertainty (and what to do about it)
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• Cognitive Ethology and Cat Companionship
• Understanding the cascading effect of carnivore loss… before we lose all the carnivores
• New fossil finds provide unique insight into the variation found in “Man the Hunted”
• Is human genetic research being hampered by a failure to share data?
• Robert Trivers and colleagues on Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson’s “The evolution of eusociality”
• Steven Chillrud Visit to Pratt Institute
• Understanding biome-level response to climate change
• Human Adaptation and Happiness

Decomposition (4)

• Deep Look on nutrient transport by salmon
• Republicans release climate change plan based on “Respiration Reduction”
• Charlotte Douglas International Airport employs worms to close the loop on airport waste
• Freaked out grasshoppers just do not contribute to decomposition in the same manner as their more relaxed brethren

Department of Mathematics & Science (15)

Deserts (5)

• Where’s the world’s biggest solar-electric power station going to be located?
• Rivers, Lakes, Seas, and Environmental Justice
• Water, Alfalfa, China, and a modern Tragedy of the Commons
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services

Development (14)

• Don’t blame people for being obese (blame their neighborhood)
• Fantastic piece on nature/nurture by Patrick F. Clarkin in TVOL
• Arming the Donkeys on kids, parenting, and Burning Man
• My article on adolescence featured in the This View of Life culture series
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• Jeremy Yoder on contemporary selection for increased human height
• Maybe infants don’t really care who helps and who hinders after all…
• 0.5% to 3%: Do we now have a better sense of what makes people smart?
• Do our brains require endurance activity in order to function?
• Barash not so enlightening on the paradox of human homosexuality
• Multiple Intelligences theory gets some neuroscientific support
• Does American faith in genetic determinism limit the achievement of our students?
• Ready for eugenics 2.0?
• On becoming a psychopath
• New PNAS special issue explores the developmental effects of early social environment
• Think that the DNA transfer is only from parents to offspring? Think again!
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• Epigenetics on Leonard Lopate
• “DNA” by James D. Watson
• NY Times way behind the times on Nature versus Nurture
• Delayed Development and Human Evolution

Divergence (4)

• An eye is not an eye is not an eye
• The costly nature of wind pollination
• Ben Knight’s “Phyletic gradualism / Punctuated equilibrium”
• Cognitive Ethology and Cat Companionship

DNA Barcoding (3)

• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• “DNA” by James D. Watson
• The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution

Easy Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (4)

• My Evolution 2014 talk is on YouTube
• Short movie showing features of Easy-IPD
• Easy-IPD version 1.0 released!
• Computer-Based Tools for Teaching about Robert Axelrod’s Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments

Eco 101 (3)

• Eco 101: Exponential Growth & Decay
• Announcing “Eco 101”, a series of blog posts on the basics of ecology
• Eco 101: Carrying Capacity

Ecological Footprinting (8)

• My ecological footprint for 2016-2017
• My ecological footprint for 2015-2016
• My ecological footprint for 2014-2015
• There’s No Such Thing as Qualitative Sustainability
• Do we need to delete to keep the web sustainable?
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• UCS “Cooler Smarter” footprint calculator promotes lower carbon behaviors
• Using Ecological Footprints to Teach Sustainability

Ecological Modeling (26)

• How renewable power sources grow more trees
• Are corals riding ocean currents to exert climate change dominance over macroalgae?
• Lev Ginzburg Fest: celebration of a “retirement”
• ECOmotion Studios on Simberloff & Wilson’s island biogeography experiments
• Rule number one of cooperative bacterial warfare? Be in the majority.
• Carrying capacity — but not growth rate — varies with habitat quality (at least for moose)
• Evolution beyond adaptation: a critical step for evolutionary theory
• My review of the “Encyclopedia of Theoretical Ecology” published in QRB
• Our review paper on Late Pleistocene Extinction Modeling published in QRB!
• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology
• Understanding the cascading effect of carnivore loss… before we lose all the carnivores
• Working on a VUE concept map of the fieldTest simulation
• My review of Railsback and Grimm’s “Agent-based and individual-based modeling” textbook published in Ecology
• Michael Ruse on James Lovelock’s Gaia of 2012
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• My review of “How Species Interact” published in Ecological Modelling
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• ESA 2012 Workshop #8, Getting off the Ground with Individual-Based Modeling: A Primer for Instructors and Researchers
• Preview of the 2012 Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Perhaps nestedness is just an artifact of ecological opportunity (and not stability)
• Steven Railsback and Volker Grimm offer new introduction to the process of agent- and individual-based modeling
• Online tools for teaching the basics of population growth
• If Only Game Designers Were Scientists
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – “Big Models” Special Session

Ecological Restoration (5)

• How renewable power sources grow more trees
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• “In Defense of Plants” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the return of five-lined skinks

Ecological Society of America (27)

• Urban Transect Walks: helping your students see the overlap between ecological and social patterns
• Hey, ho, Portland Oregon ESA 2017, let’s go!
• ECOmotion Studios on Huffaker’s crazy experiments to make prey and predators coexist
• ECOmotion Studios on Simberloff & Wilson’s island biogeography experiments
• ECOmotion Studios on Hairston Smith Slobodkin and why the earth is green
• EcoMotion studios celebrates Robert Paine’s Pisaster experiments
• Recommendations for creating a more student-centered classroom
• “The Sustainable Use of Fisheries” now a part of the EcoEd Digital Library
• Useful guides for writing good pseudocode
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• ESA 2012 Workshop #8, Getting off the Ground with Individual-Based Modeling: A Primer for Instructors and Researchers
• Preview of the 2012 Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• ESA 2010 (Overall Impressions)
• ESA 2010 Day 6 (August 6th)
• ESA 2010 Day 5 (August 5th)
• ESA 2010 Day 4 (August 4th)
• ESA 2010 Day 3 (August 3rd)
• ESA 2010 Day 2 (August 2nd)
• ESA 2010 Day 1 (August 1st)
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – “Big Models” Special Session
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday): Afternoon sessions
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – Mutualistic Networks Symposium
• ESA 2009 Meeting Day #2 (Monday)
• ESA 2009 Day #1 (Sunday)

Ecology (56)

• STEAMplant project brings local primary school kids to Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden
• How will the COVID-19 crisis affect action on climate change?
• Core of Me short video
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2019)
• Eco-Performance Lab during Pratt’s 2019 Green Week the first step of “To the Core of Me”
• My newest STEAMplant collaboration is “To the Core of Me: A Hike Play”
• My interview with Ardis DeFreece has been published in SciArt Magazine
• YES, microplastics end up in our guts. Now the question is from where? And to what effect?
• How renewable power sources grow more trees
• Australia’s a hot spot for climate change politics, climate change science, and climate change suffering
• Humans arrive, other mammals shrink
• Don’t blame people for being obese (blame their neighborhood)
• Mom leaves, offspring get buff and work together
• Wildfires driven more by lowered precipitation than elevated temperatures or reduced snowpack
• Are corals riding ocean currents to exert climate change dominance over macroalgae?
• We aren’t the only gardeners on Madgascar
• Meta-analysis suggests that pesticides impair bee memory and learning
• No-till has some big no-catastrophic-climate-change potential
• What might we discover in the ocean twilight zone?
• Parasites better watch out for parasites!
• Model suggests that warming climate will catalyze greater insect-pest crop losses
• Escape is a big risk in aquaculture
• Is it possible that Trump’s science-adviser is a stealth climate-change accepter?
• Is sexualization of women driven by the structure of our economy?
• Both primates have their own uses for the same land
• Can a realistically-parameterized model tell us why our brains are so big?
• Professor Jensen’s Guide to Urban Cycling
• PBS’ Deep Look on mole crabs
• PBS’ Deep Look on Firefly communication and deception
• I will present my EnviroAtlas class activities at NCSE 2018
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2017)
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Deep Look on nutrient transport by salmon
• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• BLUE WEEK 2017 comes to Pratt Institute
• Urban Transect Walks: helping your students see the overlap between ecological and social patterns
• Hey, ho, Portland Oregon ESA 2017, let’s go!
• My review of new edited Trophic Ecology book out in the Quarterly Review of Biology
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2017)
• Pratt News features short piece on Dr. Roland Kays’s campus visit
• Republicans release climate change plan based on “Respiration Reduction”
• Green Week 2017 opens at Pratt Institute
• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• Like boats & science?… this might be the artist’s residency for you!
• Science and art in dialogue: Pratt Manhattan Gallery hosts Dr. Rachael Winfree
• Eco 101: Exponential Growth & Decay
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Hedgehogs, Raccoons, and Urbanite Biophilia
• Skeptoid podcast on Colony Collapse Disorder
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2016)
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• 2016 Sustainability Summit live on Pratt’s Video Site
• Concerned about NYC’s air quality? Here’s a quick page to check…
• Want to know where NYC’s water supply stands? There’s a DEP page for that!
• My ecological footprint for 2016-2017
• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• Sustainability Summit at Pratt Institute featuring Josh Fox
• Biophotovoltaics: a promising design innovation, or a great example of lack of quantitative design?
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2016)
• Where’s the world’s biggest solar-electric power station going to be located?
• It’s good to remember how fast things change, culturally & biologically
• My ecological footprint for 2015-2016
• Alternative music legend Morrissey agrees to adopt 2 million feral cats in win-win for felines, Australian native fauna
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• Students succeed in convincing the Pratt Board of Trustees to divest from fossil fuels
• Like to forage for mushrooms? Beware the Amanita!
• I am honored to be visiting the Green Meadow Waldorf School as part of their week-long Sustainability workshop
• “This is the Nature of Cities” podcast on urban bees and civic ecology
• “Science: A Candle in the Dark” podcast on Urban Ecology
• “In Defense of Plants” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the return of five-lined skinks
• Announcing “Eco 101”, a series of blog posts on the basics of ecology
• Why are architects required to take a course focused on ecology and environmental science?
• Eco 101: Carrying Capacity
• An eye is not an eye is not an eye
• Food is personal, sometimes ethical, but rarely political
• Is New York City a “sustainable” metropolis?
• Clever study shows how cooperative bacteria sanction — and therefore exclude — cheaters
• Can understanding cooperation lead to higher-yield crops?
• Lev Ginzburg Fest: celebration of a “retirement”
• It was an honor to talk to St. Francis College!
• My first “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators” talk: next Friday at St. Francis College
• Crucial climate talks in Paris take place in a socially repressive environment
• Are technological optimists too optimistic about technological sustainability?
• Jonathan Haidt on the business advantage of being ethical
• Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
• China shifts a failed cultural policy designed to stabilize population
• Major masts made by multiplicative modification
• Does the rapid spread of a culture of over-exploitation intensify our impact on wild food sources?
• Are parasites really ecologically necessary?
• Shark attacks are down, but you still have to make good decisions out there on the ocean
• While we vacuum the seas, we may as well clean them of debris…
• Cargo ships a major source of NOx emissions
• Why the “just burn it all” approach to ending fossil fuel dependence does not work
• Mist net photographs as art?
• Charismatic megafauna offer protection to their less appealing heterospecifics
• Urbanization is not urbanization: density, not size, drives sustainability
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• Without sustainability in our diets, we won’t be sustainable
• ECOmotion Studios on Huffaker’s crazy experiments to make prey and predators coexist
• ECOmotion Studios on Simberloff & Wilson’s island biogeography experiments
• ECOmotion Studios on Hairston Smith Slobodkin and why the earth is green
• EcoMotion studios celebrates Robert Paine’s Pisaster experiments
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on synanthropes and urban island castaways
• Should we compromise with nations that hunt whales?
• Are big corporate polluters trying to “artwash” their image?
• Formation of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution has the potential to catalyze research into how culture evolves
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• Can good design make highways less of a problem?
• Rule number one of cooperative bacterial warfare? Be in the majority.
• WmD Episode #00003 has been released
• Carrying capacity — but not growth rate — varies with habitat quality (at least for moose)
• Go mutualistic or go home?
• WmD Episode #00002 has been released
• So much for the big-brained city bird theory?
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on big animals in big cities
• Rivers, Lakes, Seas, and Environmental Justice
• Urban tree power
• My new favorite concept mapping activity: depicting whole-system ecological flows
• Evolution beyond adaptation: a critical step for evolutionary theory
• Sadly, the Population Bombers (mostly) still don’t get it
• Court Ruling in the Netherlands may point the way to cracking the climate compliance conundrum
• Zoonosis, Ebola, and the Elusive Reservoir Host
• Is the threat of regulation enough to incentivize cooperation from nitrogen polluters?
• In the end, climate compromise comes down to writing and editing
• Grass on a Pedestal
• The costly nature of wind pollination
• New article in Science provides a comprehensive overview and update on Yellowstone National Park
• My ecological footprint for 2014-2015
• On the verge of 400 ppm Carbon Dioxide: a symbolic threshold
• PCB Bioaccumulation and Polar Bear Penises
• The Big Questions in Ecology and Evolution
• My review of the “Encyclopedia of Theoretical Ecology” published in QRB
• Water, Alfalfa, China, and a modern Tragedy of the Commons
• Evolution 2014: Day 2
• Evolution 2014: Day 1
• Evolution 2014: Could the right symbionts provide protection from chytrid infection to amphibians?
• Evolution 2014: Are island mutualist communities more likely to be nested because they are inherently more unstable?
• Evolution 2014: Is thyme a facultative mutualist with leguminous plants?
• Evolution 2014: Lemurs display huge diet diversity, and their gut microbes track this diversity
• Evolution 2014: Aphids protect themselves from parasitoids by harboring a bacteria whose viral parasite is toxic
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Evolution 2014: Evolution of cooperation in the high school classroom? You bet!
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• John Oliver holds first “balanced” climate debate on television
• Our review paper on Late Pleistocene Extinction Modeling published in QRB!
• Is “nest parasitism” really “nest mutualism”?
• There’s No Such Thing as Qualitative Sustainability
• New glacial maximum on Mount ARC provides definitive evidence that Pratt’s sustainability efforts are working
• I receive funding to initiate the WmD Project
• Interesting numbers on the sustainability (or lack thereof) of the aviation industry
• If sloths endure costs to maintain closed-loop agricultural systems, why can’t we?
• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• Was Teilhard de Chardin the real inventor of an evolutionary approach to culture?
• Understanding the cascading effect of carnivore loss… before we lose all the carnivores
• Why socially-progressive scientists should not make bets…
• Cod gone on Cape Cod
• Concentrated factory farming of livestock massively alters the phosphorus cycle
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• CNN tackles climate change by explaining public goods games!
• Now legal, Northern California’s pot farms join the rest of agriculture in impacting water supply
• Nice infographic on global and domestic food waste
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• Would a different term make us better appreciate ecosystem services?
• Caterpillars weaponize nicotine
• Microbes may surf their way to successful cooperation
• An amazing indictment of the academic publishing industry (in which most of us participate)
• Should we emulate the cooperative and conservative habits of the sloth?
• Additional evidence that obesity may be due to environment, not just habits
• A tour of your diverse microbiome, and the things that might deplete that diversity
• With all we know, we still know too little to reliably re-engineer ecosystems
• New evidence of whooping crane culture on the rebound
• Schadenfreude as an instinct born of being a social, hierarchical animal
• Cooperative child-rearing pays dividends for ruffed lemurs, irrespective of kinship
• National Geographic “The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion”
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Where to publish in ecology & evolution without funding for page charges
• Mammal monogamy still a mystery, but maybe more than a numbers game
• Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno
• Great NPR piece on how simple it would be for us to reduce carbon emissions
• Working on a VUE concept map of the fieldTest simulation
• NPR piece suggests that economics are pushing us towards nutrient recycling
• My review of Railsback and Grimm’s “Agent-based and individual-based modeling” textbook published in Ecology
• “Earth Hour” seeks to re-focus our attention on all the earth provides
• Forward on Climate Rally seeks to shift the national dialogue on anthropogenic climate change
• Quantifying the climate value of that 40-acre woodlot
• Dog license dataset opens up huge potential for understanding the dog-human mutualism
• Production on marginal lands can meet only 25% of our biofuel mandates
• Charlotte Douglas International Airport employs worms to close the loop on airport waste
• Fracking study retracted after the discovery of a massive conflict of interest
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• National Geographic feature on penguin propulsion
• Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• Megan Frederickson shares the wonder of ant cooperation with Toronto Library patrons
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• Michael Ruse on James Lovelock’s Gaia of 2012
• Rogue iron fertilization? Things have gotten weird!
• Rob Nixon on Rachel Carson’s prescience
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• Barry Commoner, pioneering scientist and environmentalist, is dead at 95
• Some conservatives actually see the public health and economic dilemmas posed by greenhouse gas emissions
• Can proper education allow reputation to foster action on climate change?
• Want a good gauge of how much humans pollute waterways? Just measure for caffeine!
• The humble Mistletoe turns out to be a probable keystone species
• Climate and Clean Air Coalition unites air pollution concerns
• Reductions in fertilizer use are now worth carbon credits
• Does anthropogenic change make natives into invaders?
• Are the Sentinelese the last untouched hunter-gatherer culture?
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• Rachel Carson still under attack for bringing her values to bear on her science
• Rebranding global warming as a health threat
• Bacterial societies defy selfish gene predictions
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• “Adaptive” approach to climate change puts faith in resilience thinking
• My review of “How Species Interact” published in Ecological Modelling
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• ESA 2012 Workshop #8, Getting off the Ground with Individual-Based Modeling: A Primer for Instructors and Researchers
• The many ecotones of the Columbia Gorge
• Preview of the 2012 Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Mark Bittman on the ecological imperative of eating less meat
• Climate change makes mountaineering more risky
• Acid rain policy changes yield slow but real ecological results
• High-throughput screening accelerates the rate at which evolved plant chemicals can be turned into medicine
• Fences exclude invasive predators, give aid to threatened Hawaiian birds
• Macroecologists weigh in on how well sustainability science considers ecological limits
• High tech ad hoc fixes face off against good old-fashioned prevention in the Baltic Sea
• The ecological impacts of the BP-Deepwater Horizon oil spill quantified
• Perhaps nestedness is just an artifact of ecological opportunity (and not stability)
• Condors, hunters, and the National Rifle Association
• Evolution may be too slow: British Columbia begins assisted migration of forests
• Extensive long-term studies document the effect of biodiversity in ecosystem productivity
• National Geographic goes looking for heat-loving bacteria in a very cold place
• National Geographic’s “If They Could Only Talk” considers Easter Island’s many mysteries
• Are the population dynamics of Dupont’s lark dictated by multilevel selective pressures?
• New study published in Ecology Letters quantifies the effects of intensive agriculture on large-scale biodiversity
• Bird study suggests that multilevel selection theory is necessary to understand population dynamics
• Most people (at least in Spain) recognize the value of ecosystem services, but their valuation varies
• Could differential symbiosis be a mechanism by which genetically-variable hosts speciate?
• Would you like a few red-listed species with that shrimp cocktail sir?
• Mutualistic fungus transfers nitrogen from parasitized insects to its plant host
• North Carolina legislators enact strict law limiting the rate of natural change
• Do you need cooperation in your model to explain why there are more right-handed people?
• Scientific American “Why We Help”
• Who is the bigger bioterrorist, man or nature?
• There is no doubt that there are conservation trade-offs associated with the proliferation of wind power
• Brian Czech warns ecologists against drinking the “sustainable growth Koolaid”
• Honey bees harbor a remarkably diverse community of mutualistic gut microbes
• Lyme disease extensification may have more to do with foxes than deer
• “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” exhibit at the American Museum on Natural History
• Freaked out grasshoppers just do not contribute to decomposition in the same manner as their more relaxed brethren
• Aquatic food chains have gotten longer and less diverse over evolutionary time
• Digital organisms yield new insights into the effects of extinction on long-term phylogenetic patterns of evolution
• Mesocosm experiment considers the effects of human modification of community structure
• Big felines have lots of commensal fans
• The Australian Government blocks coal mine to protect the Great Barrier Reef
• Does climate change have the potential to reduce the stabilizing effects of biodiversity?
• Understanding the effects of asymmetry and relatedness on social volunteerism
• Economic Whales and their Parasites
• Will invasive truffles become the bane of European epicures?
• Are the most lucrative components of the financial sector parasites on the larger economy?
• How fast do anthropogenic impacts get amplified up the food chain? Ask a bluefin!
• Paulinella chromatophora’s photosynthetic engine blurs the line between endosymbiont and organelle
• An argument for better Frankensteins (and thus more prudent use of technology)
• Can cod come back?
• Molly H. Adams earns top honors from the Critical and Visual Studies program
• James K. Galbraith makes the connection between debt policy and social stability
• BBC covers the up side of the North Pacific plastic “garbage patch”
• Painting called “Endosymbiosis” honors the legacy of Lynn Margulis
• 2012 Sustainability Crash Course at Pratt Institute
• Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild”
• Steven Railsback and Volker Grimm offer new introduction to the process of agent- and individual-based modeling
• Is the European Union going rogue or playing altruist on airline emissions?
• Joel E. Cohen on the 7 billion human mark
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• Howard Rheingold TED talk urges a global movement to study cooperation
• There’s Dirt Under Them Thar Sidewalks
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Patterns in mussel beds may reflect interaction between individual behavior and emergent environmental patterns
• Online tools for teaching the basics of population growth
• Hurricane Irene evacuation naysayers point out some fundamental human problems with understanding risk
• If Only Game Designers Were Scientists
• Aquaculture on Leonard Lopate
• Sex and Slime on Fresh Air
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• Saving Puffins, One Clip at a Time
• Mirsky on Poop in Space
• Using Ecological Footprints to Teach Sustainability
• Are Eco-labels an Effective Tool for Conservation?
• Official video of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010
• National Geographic’s “Science of Dogs”
• 2010 Convention on Biological Diversity and Ecosystem Services (Sorta)
• Asian Carp on NPR
• National Geographic “Wolf Wars”
• The Cove
• Steven Chillrud Visit to Pratt Institute
• Vegans and the Quest for Sanity
• ESA 2010 (Overall Impressions)
• ESA 2010 Day 6 (August 6th)
• ESA 2010 Day 5 (August 5th)
• ESA 2010 Day 4 (August 4th)
• ESA 2010 Day 3 (August 3rd)
• ESA 2010 Day 2 (August 2nd)
• ESA 2010 Day 1 (August 1st)
• Understanding biome-level response to climate change
• National Geographic “Fatal Attraction”
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – “Big Models” Special Session
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday): Afternoon sessions
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – Mutualistic Networks Symposium
• ESA 2009 Meeting Day #2 (Monday)
• ESA 2009 Day #1 (Sunday)
• Changing and not changing the way we use our agricultural land
• Human Adaptation and Happiness
• An Introduction

Ecology Education (27)

• STEAMplant project brings local primary school kids to Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden
• I will be participating in the 2019 NCEP Teaching & Learning Studio
• My newest STEAMplant collaboration is “To the Core of Me: A Hike Play”
• Deep Look on nutrient transport by salmon
• Hey, ho, Portland Oregon ESA 2017, let’s go!
• Green Week 2017 opens at Pratt Institute
• My ecological footprint for 2016-2017
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• Why are architects required to take a course focused on ecology and environmental science?
• ECOmotion Studios on Huffaker’s crazy experiments to make prey and predators coexist
• ECOmotion Studios on Simberloff & Wilson’s island biogeography experiments
• EcoMotion studios celebrates Robert Paine’s Pisaster experiments
• My new favorite concept mapping activity: depicting whole-system ecological flows
• Recommendations for creating a more student-centered classroom
• I receive funding to initiate the WmD Project
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• New assessment of scientific reasoning skills suggests that students need better inquiry-based education
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Eco-mysticism in the Ecology Classroom, Discontinuity in Evolutionary Theory
• Using Ecological Footprints to Teach Sustainability
• Official video of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010
• National Geographic “Wolf Wars”
• Sourcing sources of selection
• Moving away from textbooks
• ESA 2009 Meeting Day #2 (Monday)

Economic sustainability (19)

• Urban Transect Walks: helping your students see the overlap between ecological and social patterns
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• Would a “labor economy” lead to different outcomes than the “capital economy”?
• China shifts a failed cultural policy designed to stabilize population
• What open access evangelists often miss about the task at hand
• Interesting numbers on the sustainability (or lack thereof) of the aviation industry
• TurnUp seeks to turn excess art materials into treasure, not trash
• Why socially-progressive scientists should not make bets…
• NPR piece suggests that economics are pushing us towards nutrient recycling
• Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
• Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Science Magazine outlines the big scientific issues at Rio+20
• Joseph E. Stiglitz discusses the economically destabilizing impact of rent-seeking
• Economic Whales and their Parasites
• Are the most lucrative components of the financial sector parasites on the larger economy?

Economics (42)

• Is sexualization of women driven by the structure of our economy?
• Urban Transect Walks: helping your students see the overlap between ecological and social patterns
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• Students succeed in convincing the Pratt Board of Trustees to divest from fossil fuels
• Would a “labor economy” lead to different outcomes than the “capital economy”?
• Jonathan Haidt on the business advantage of being ethical
• China shifts a failed cultural policy designed to stabilize population
• What open access evangelists often miss about the task at hand
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• Is technological evolution “de-agglomerating” cultural innovation?
• Should we compromise with nations that hunt whales?
• Does the ability to accumulate wealth make us value the future more?
• Donald Trump saves CitiBike, proving that selfishness and cooperation are no longer opposed
• TurnUp seeks to turn excess art materials into treasure, not trash
• Why socially-progressive scientists should not make bets…
• Concentrated factory farming of livestock massively alters the phosphorus cycle
• Open Access publishing and “peer review” fail the test of a well-designed hoax
• An amazing indictment of the academic publishing industry (in which most of us participate)
• Great NPR piece on how simple it would be for us to reduce carbon emissions
• The benefits of a maintaining a relatively small in-group
• Green port policies yield big decreases in the ecological footprint of shipping
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• Rob Nixon on Rachel Carson’s prescience
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• Can neuroeconomics help economics become a real science?
• Some conservatives actually see the public health and economic dilemmas posed by greenhouse gas emissions
• Greece’s massive recession is making it more ecologically sustainable
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Understanding the role of the Templeton Foundation in funding evolutionary biology research
• Jason Collins questions the utility-to-fitness conversion
• Brian Czech warns ecologists against drinking the “sustainable growth Koolaid”
• Joseph E. Stiglitz discusses the economically destabilizing impact of rent-seeking
• Economic Whales and their Parasites
• Will invasive truffles become the bane of European epicures?
• Are the most lucrative components of the financial sector parasites on the larger economy?
• Is the European Union going rogue or playing altruist on airline emissions?
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Is humanity’s most dangerous technology debt?
• National Geographic “Can China go green?”
• Easy-IPD version 1.0 released!

Ecosystem Ecology (8)

• Are parasites really ecologically necessary?
• My new favorite concept mapping activity: depicting whole-system ecological flows
• Evolution beyond adaptation: a critical step for evolutionary theory
• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology
• Was Teilhard de Chardin the real inventor of an evolutionary approach to culture?
• Concentrated factory farming of livestock massively alters the phosphorus cycle
• Michael Ruse on James Lovelock’s Gaia of 2012
• Extensive long-term studies document the effect of biodiversity in ecosystem productivity

Ecosystem Services (35)

• I will present my EnviroAtlas class activities at NCSE 2018
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Urban Transect Walks: helping your students see the overlap between ecological and social patterns
• Hey, ho, Portland Oregon ESA 2017, let’s go!
• Want to know where NYC’s water supply stands? There’s a DEP page for that!
• My ecological footprint for 2015-2016
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• “This is the Nature of Cities” podcast on urban bees and civic ecology
• My ecological footprint for 2014-2015
• Water, Alfalfa, China, and a modern Tragedy of the Commons
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology
• Why socially-progressive scientists should not make bets…
• Would a different term make us better appreciate ecosystem services?
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• Michael Ruse on James Lovelock’s Gaia of 2012
• Rogue iron fertilization? Things have gotten weird!
• Barry Commoner, pioneering scientist and environmentalist, is dead at 95
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• Preview of the 2012 Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Extensive long-term studies document the effect of biodiversity in ecosystem productivity
• Most people (at least in Spain) recognize the value of ecosystem services, but their valuation varies
• Molly H. Adams earns top honors from the Critical and Visual Studies program
• 2012 Sustainability Crash Course at Pratt Institute
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Aquaculture on Leonard Lopate
• Mirsky on Poop in Space
• Using Ecological Footprints to Teach Sustainability
• Official video of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010
• 2010 Convention on Biological Diversity and Ecosystem Services (Sorta)

Education (3)

• I will be participating in the 2019 NCEP Teaching & Learning Studio
• Scientific American down on memorization
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available

Educational Software and Apps (9)

• A cool (new-ish) IPD game theory simulator!
• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• W.W. Norton’s new InQuizitive partner to the Bergstrom and Dugatkin Evolution textbook
• Explaining the evolutionary explanation for handedness
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Roberts Publishing releases an iPad version of their majors Evolution textbook
• Online tools for teaching the basics of population growth
• Computer-Based Tools for Teaching about Robert Axelrod’s Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments

Educational Technology (3)

• I’ll be spreading the Learning Management System love at Pratt in early November
• W.W. Norton’s new InQuizitive partner to the Bergstrom and Dugatkin Evolution textbook
• A modest presentation on Open Information Environments

Emergence (2)

• Agent-based modeling instead of game theory: I agree!
• Patterns in mussel beds may reflect interaction between individual behavior and emergent environmental patterns

Emotion (19)

• My entry on the evolution of play will be added to the massive Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science
• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• What do we know about Cultural Transmission?
• How do we know when people are actually happy?
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• Music, the cortisone balm?
• Review of What We Made by Tom Finkelpearl
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• A nice synopsis of some reasons for laughter
• Cognitive Ethology and Cat Companionship
• String Theory: should we care?
• Schadenfreude as an instinct born of being a social, hierarchical animal
• Think the Milgram Experiments tell us something definitive about human nature? Think again!
• If your “free will” is questionable, feel free to exercise your “free won’t”
• NPR provides a quick overview of the human drive to reciprocate
• On becoming a psychopath
• Can neuroeconomics help economics become a real science?
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• Tim Birkenhead on anthropomorphism and animal emotion

Empathy (14)

• My entry on the evolution of play will be added to the massive Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science
• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• Arming the Donkeys on kids, parenting, and Burning Man
• America Society of Primatologists condemns H. A. and Margret Rey, calls for Curious George boycott
• Primates — but not their rodent relatives — can infer the effects of other individuals on resource availability
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• Maybe infants don’t really care who helps and who hinders after all…
• A chance to learn how an understanding of empathy can inform design
• Review of What We Made by Tom Finkelpearl
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• Writing and record-keeping as important tools in the evolution of large-scale human cooperation
• My review of “Origins of Altruism and Cooperation” is published in QRB
• Think the Milgram Experiments tell us something definitive about human nature? Think again!
• Brief NYT article on empathy in children

Envirolutions (16)

• Green Week 2017 opens at Pratt Institute
• 2016 Sustainability Summit live on Pratt’s Video Site
• An inspiring summit, but big challenges at home and afar…
• Sustainability Summit at Pratt Institute featuring Josh Fox
• Students succeed in convincing the Pratt Board of Trustees to divest from fossil fuels
• Envirolutions brings bottle transformation to Green Week 2015
• Envirolutions graduates its largest (and most celebrated) cohort
• Pledge, Petition, Protect! All at Green Week 2014!
• What the move towards a more sustainable Pratt looks like…
• Envirolutions asks the Pratt community to identify where there is “room for improvement”
• Envirolutions club launches its “Room for Improvement” campaign
• Pratt Envirolutions Students Bring Recycling Bins to Campus
• Envirolutions students release Trash Tetris video to promote recycling bin launch
• Green Week events celebrate cycling and recycling
• Pratt Envirolutions trumpets green initiatives during Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Pratt Envirolutions leads campaign for reusable containers

Environmental Justice (52)

• My newest STEAMplant collaboration is “To the Core of Me: A Hike Play”
• YES, microplastics end up in our guts. Now the question is from where? And to what effect?
• Don’t blame people for being obese (blame their neighborhood)
• I will present my EnviroAtlas class activities at NCSE 2018
• BLUE WEEK 2017 comes to Pratt Institute
• Urban Transect Walks: helping your students see the overlap between ecological and social patterns
• Green Week 2017 opens at Pratt Institute
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• 2016 Sustainability Summit live on Pratt’s Video Site
• My ecological footprint for 2016-2017
• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• An inspiring summit, but big challenges at home and afar…
• My ecological footprint for 2015-2016
• “This is the Nature of Cities” podcast on urban bees and civic ecology
• Crucial climate talks in Paris take place in a socially repressive environment
• Do we need to have a kinder, gentler one-child policy in Western industrial countries?
• Are technological optimists too optimistic about technological sustainability?
• Formation of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution has the potential to catalyze research into how culture evolves
• Rivers, Lakes, Seas, and Environmental Justice
• Court Ruling in the Netherlands may point the way to cracking the climate compliance conundrum
• Is the threat of regulation enough to incentivize cooperation from nitrogen polluters?
• My ecological footprint for 2014-2015
• Review of What We Made by Tom Finkelpearl
• Water, Alfalfa, China, and a modern Tragedy of the Commons
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• CNN tackles climate change by explaining public goods games!
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• “Earth Hour” seeks to re-focus our attention on all the earth provides
• Forward on Climate Rally seeks to shift the national dialogue on anthropogenic climate change
• Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
• Rogue iron fertilization? Things have gotten weird!
• Rob Nixon on Rachel Carson’s prescience
• Barry Commoner, pioneering scientist and environmentalist, is dead at 95
• Climate and Clean Air Coalition unites air pollution concerns
• Are the Sentinelese the last untouched hunter-gatherer culture?
• Rachel Carson still under attack for bringing her values to bear on her science
• Rebranding global warming as a health threat
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Molly H. Adams earns top honors from the Critical and Visual Studies program
• 2012 Sustainability Crash Course at Pratt Institute
• Is the European Union going rogue or playing altruist on airline emissions?
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• National Geographic “Can China go green?”
• Using Ecological Footprints to Teach Sustainability
• Reclaiming a Rigorous Definition of “Sustainability”
• Official video of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010
• 2010 Convention on Biological Diversity and Ecosystem Services (Sorta)
• Steven Chillrud Visit to Pratt Institute
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday): Afternoon sessions
• Common Ground Symposium at Columbia University

Epigenetics (7)

• Fantastic piece on nature/nurture by Patrick F. Clarkin in TVOL
• FDA investigators raid American Society of Human Genetics offices in Carl Zimmer cloning case
• New theory explaining the prevalence of homosexuality focuses on epigenetics
• Multiple Intelligences theory gets some neuroscientific support
• Ready for eugenics 2.0?
• Think that the DNA transfer is only from parents to offspring? Think again!
• Epigenetics on Leonard Lopate

Ethics (77)

• My interview with Ardis DeFreece has been published in SciArt Magazine
• Can mathematics save us from partisan Gerrymandering?
• BLUE WEEK 2017 comes to Pratt Institute
• Moral Sense III approaches, June 2nd at St. Francis College
• Republicans release climate change plan based on “Respiration Reduction”
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• My ecological footprint for 2016-2017
• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• An inspiring summit, but big challenges at home and afar…
• How Moodle allows you to remove your bias when grading quizzes
• FDA investigators raid American Society of Human Genetics offices in Carl Zimmer cloning case
• Alternative music legend Morrissey agrees to adopt 2 million feral cats in win-win for felines, Australian native fauna
• Dan Ariely’s “Arming the Donkeys” podcast
• Injury intuition confirmation bias? Farce article goes really viral
• Would a “labor economy” lead to different outcomes than the “capital economy”?
• To be an effective critical theorist of science, it helps to understand science
• Do we need to have a kinder, gentler one-child policy in Western industrial countries?
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• China shifts a failed cultural policy designed to stabilize population
• Mist net photographs as art?
• What open access evangelists often miss about the task at hand
• Should we compromise with nations that hunt whales?
• Darwin in social context? Ric Brown’s fascinating survey of some important contemporaries
• Should altruism have an effect on your final exam score?
• Can we resolve the ‘group selection debate’ by focusing on human cooperation?
• E&E in A&D: Genetic profiling as art?
• The forces of cultural evolution push hard on political humor
• Water, Alfalfa, China, and a modern Tragedy of the Commons
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• String Theory: should we care?
• Nice infographic on global and domestic food waste
• Open Access publishing and “peer review” fail the test of a well-designed hoax
• An amazing indictment of the academic publishing industry (in which most of us participate)
• Think the Milgram Experiments tell us something definitive about human nature? Think again!
• Sarah Coakley on the connection between theology and evolutionary theory
• Is this site good enough to clone?
• The benefits of a maintaining a relatively small in-group
• Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
• Forward on Climate Rally seeks to shift the national dialogue on anthropogenic climate change
• Fracking study retracted after the discovery of a massive conflict of interest
• NPR provides a quick overview of the human drive to reciprocate
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• Chronicle of Higher Education feature explores the question of why more women do not succeed in science
• Ready for eugenics 2.0?
• On becoming a psychopath
• Rogue iron fertilization? Things have gotten weird!
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• Enforcing norms may be for personal gain, not to maintain social order (at least amongst Santa Barbara undergraduates)
• Punishment, properly rewarded, can promote cooperation without corruption
• Are the Sentinelese the last untouched hunter-gatherer culture?
• “School of Life” acknowledges the values in religion worth preserving
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Should conservation scientists also be advocates for particular policies?
• A pharma-agricultural tragedy of the commons?
• Ted Kaczynski as a scholar of resistance to technology
• Brian Czech warns ecologists against drinking the “sustainable growth Koolaid”
• Joseph E. Stiglitz discusses the economically destabilizing impact of rent-seeking
• Economic Whales and their Parasites
• Larry Arnhart reviews E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• Molly H. Adams earns top honors from the Critical and Visual Studies program
• James K. Galbraith makes the connection between debt policy and social stability
• Is the European Union going rogue or playing altruist on airline emissions?
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Hurricane Irene evacuation naysayers point out some fundamental human problems with understanding risk
• How the right wing co-opts research into the evolution of cooperation
• Is humanity’s most dangerous technology debt?
• Barash and Lipton on Bin Laden (and Us)
• “A Paradise Built in Hell” by Rebecca Solnit
• Using Ecological Footprints to Teach Sustainability
• Scientific American “Controlling the Brain with Light”
• The Role of Technology in Human Evolution
• National Geographic’s “Science of Dogs”
• Firefighting and the Tragedy of the Commons
• The Cove

Eutrophication (5)

• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• Is the threat of regulation enough to incentivize cooperation from nitrogen polluters?
• Grass on a Pedestal
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• Concentrated factory farming of livestock massively alters the phosphorus cycle

EvoDevo (3)

• Fantastic piece on nature/nurture by Patrick F. Clarkin in TVOL
• Evolution 2014: Day 2
• Can crocheting help save corals? Can we learn something about developmental genetics in the process?

Evolution (81)

• STEAMplant project brings local primary school kids to Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden
• Alexandra Walling illuminates the mutual aid between evolutionary biologists and Jeffrey Epstein
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2019)
• SSE tells HHS to acknowledge sex and gender diversity
• A cool (new-ish) IPD game theory simulator!
• When it comes to considering sex and gender, don’t forget sex determination
• Break not the ungulate culture of migration
• Humans arrive, other mammals shrink
• Scientific American drops special issue on “Science of Being Human”
• Don’t blame people for being obese (blame their neighborhood)
• Mom: “Eat my sh*t and then help your younger siblings”
• Mom leaves, offspring get buff and work together
• We aren’t the only gardeners on Madgascar
• All it takes to get a little specialized is a small increase in group size…
• Different hominin species not so species-like it seems
• Parasites better watch out for parasites!
• Is sexualization of women driven by the structure of our economy?
• Can a realistically-parameterized model tell us why our brains are so big?
• Professor Jensen’s Guide to Urban Cycling
• Alan Rabinowitz, 1953-2018
• My entry on the evolution of play will be added to the massive Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science
• PBS’ Deep Look on mole crabs
• PBS’ Deep Look on Firefly communication and deception
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2017)
• Why Artists & Designers need Scientists: Exhibit A
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Fantastic piece on nature/nurture by Patrick F. Clarkin in TVOL
• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• Moral Sense III approaches, June 2nd at St. Francis College
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2017)
• Pratt News features short piece on Dr. Roland Kays’s campus visit
• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• I am honored to be part of Moral Sense III
• Support the mighty Bombardier Beetle’s quest to have its genome sequenced!
• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Hedgehogs, Raccoons, and Urbanite Biophilia
• NPR features Christopher Boehm on the love-hate relationship we have people in power
• Another great Skeptoid episode, this one on race
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2016)
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• Maybe human impacts aren’t so dramatic (when experienced from the geologic time scale)
• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• An inspiring summit, but big challenges at home and afar…
• Arming the Donkeys on kids, parenting, and Burning Man
• My article on adolescence featured in the This View of Life culture series
• Pratt students make the potential trip to Mars better designed
• A potentially interesting Evolution of Play documentary
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2016)
• You can check out my first Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk (at St. Francis College) on YouTube
• Soon-to-be released Evolution and Human Culture book to feature my testimonial
• It’s good to remember how fast things change, culturally & biologically
• What can be made by mimicking biological “assemblies”?
• FDA investigators raid American Society of Human Genetics offices in Carl Zimmer cloning case
• Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson liberated after month-long kidnapping ordeal
• America Society of Primatologists condemns H. A. and Margret Rey, calls for Curious George boycott
• Like to forage for mushrooms? Beware the Amanita!
• Great conversation at my Columbia University Population Biology Seminar talk
• My next Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk: Columbia University on March 7th, 2016
• I visit Pratt’s Poetics Lab focused on play
• Dan Ariely’s “Arming the Donkeys” podcast
• What do we know about Cultural Transmission?
• Emerging Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution releases roadmap document
• An eye is not an eye is not an eye
• Food is personal, sometimes ethical, but rarely political
• How do we know when people are actually happy?
• Understanding [culture + multilevel selection] = potential for Sustainability
• Is there a trade-off between reproduction and creativity?
• Would a “labor economy” lead to different outcomes than the “capital economy”?
• Clever study shows how cooperative bacteria sanction — and therefore exclude — cheaters
• Can understanding cooperation lead to higher-yield crops?
• How the built environment influences our ability to sustain personal and environmental commitments
• Personalized DNA tests likely to provide further evidence of human inter-connectedness
• My personal experience that creationists gravitate to anything with even the faintest scent of scientific uncertainty (and what to do about it)
• Lev Ginzburg Fest: celebration of a “retirement”
• It was an honor to talk to St. Francis College!
• My first “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators” talk: next Friday at St. Francis College
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• How much impact can a set of free game theory infographics have?
• Crucial climate talks in Paris take place in a socially repressive environment
• To be an effective critical theorist of science, it helps to understand science
• Primates — but not their rodent relatives — can infer the effects of other individuals on resource availability
• Jeremy Yoder on contemporary selection for increased human height
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• Maybe infants don’t really care who helps and who hinders after all…
• The problem with same sex attraction “for the good of the species”
• Fascinating and clever study of how personal contact norms vary by relationship
• Jonathan Haidt on the business advantage of being ethical
• That beard and deep voice may be to put him in his place, not attract her
• What’s the evolved function of curiosity?
• Review of William B. Provine’s “The ‘Random Genetic Drift’ Fallacy”
• Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
• Polygyny: the culture we dislike might not be the culture that is evolutionarily disfavored
• China shifts a failed cultural policy designed to stabilize population
• Major masts made by multiplicative modification
• Group phenotypic composition: implications for individuals and their groups
• Does the rapid spread of a culture of over-exploitation intensify our impact on wild food sources?
• Are parasites really ecologically necessary?
• The prickly (and largely unknown) sex life of bats
• David Sloan Wilson on how Jeff Bezos don’t know squat about chickens (or evolution!)
• Does Bayesian bias aid us in making adaptive distorted self-assessments?
• Malcolm Gladwell on the social contagion of mass shootings
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• Is technological evolution “de-agglomerating” cultural innovation?
• EcoMotion studios celebrates Robert Paine’s Pisaster experiments
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on synanthropes and urban island castaways
• Like-with-like assortment plus exponential fitness increases cooperation, even under weak selection
• Should we compromise with nations that hunt whales?
• My testimonial for Gregory Tague’s “Evolution and Human Culture”
• The often-large difference between “breeding” and “parenting”
• Anne-Marie Slaughter on the tradeoff between work and caregiving
• New report on drug resistance highlights the tragedy of our antibiotics commons
• Open Tree of Life allows experts and novices alike to explore “the” phylogeny
• Do creative people have “messy minds”?
• Does the ability to accumulate wealth make us value the future more?
• Formation of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution has the potential to catalyze research into how culture evolves
• When it comes to sex, we are consumately proximate
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• Evolution 2016 meeting will feature evolution-themed art exhibit
• A chance to learn how an understanding of empathy can inform design
• Asymmetrical interaction best explained by superrational rather than rational strategy
• Our culture is special, but not especially uncommon
• Have we outgrown the scale of cooperation supported by the Big Gods of Big Religion?
• The most fundamental way in which culture pushes against biology
• Rule number one of cooperative bacterial warfare? Be in the majority.
• WmD Episode #00003 has been released
• Music, the cortisone balm?
• Should altruism have an effect on your final exam score?
• Explaining the evolutionary explanation for handedness
• WmD Episode #00002 has been released
• So much for the big-brained city bird theory?
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on big animals in big cities
• Urban tree power
• Evolution beyond adaptation: a critical step for evolutionary theory
• Zoonosis, Ebola, and the Elusive Reservoir Host
• WmD Episode #00001 has been released!
• Can we resolve the ‘group selection debate’ by focusing on human cooperation?
• Sabbatical, Sweet Sabbatical
• Is the threat of regulation enough to incentivize cooperation from nitrogen polluters?
• In the end, climate compromise comes down to writing and editing
• The costly nature of wind pollination
• How stupid professorial attitudes towards Wikipedia are making students less savvy
• PCB Bioaccumulation and Polar Bear Penises
• The Big Questions in Ecology and Evolution
• E&E in A&D: Genetic profiling as art?
• E&E in A&D: The Armstrong Lie
• Our paper on a super-rational solution to the tragedy of the commons published in Scientific Reports
• The forces of cultural evolution push hard on political humor
• Scientific American down on memorization
• Review of What We Made by Tom Finkelpearl
• Water, Alfalfa, China, and a modern Tragedy of the Commons
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• Ben Knight’s “Phyletic gradualism / Punctuated equilibrium”
• A nice synopsis of some reasons for laughter
• Do humans form genetically similar social groups independent of kinship?
• Do cancer cells play cooperate in the Prisoner’s Dilemma?
• My Evolution 2014 talk is on YouTube
• Evolution 2014: Day 2
• Evolution 2014: Day 1
• Evolution 2014: Could the right symbionts provide protection from chytrid infection to amphibians?
• Evolution 2014: Are island mutualist communities more likely to be nested because they are inherently more unstable?
• Evolution 2014: Lemurs display huge diet diversity, and their gut microbes track this diversity
• Evolution 2014: Aphids protect themselves from parasitoids by harboring a bacteria whose viral parasite is toxic
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Evolution 2014: Evolution of cooperation in the high school classroom? You bet!
• Evolution 2014: Cooperative data collection is more meaningful than individual data collection
• Evolution 2014: Students can watch fly populations evolve in a matter of weeks
• Evolution 2014: Preview
• Hawaiian crickets converge on the same solution to eavesdropping parasites
• Cath Dennis publishes non-computerized classroom adaptation of Axelrod’s iPD Tournament
• Our review paper on Late Pleistocene Extinction Modeling published in QRB!
• Apparently I should stop holding my breath for the Google Translate “dolphin” module
• Is “nest parasitism” really “nest mutualism”?
• 0.5% to 3%: Do we now have a better sense of what makes people smart?
• David Haig suggests that babies cry at night to prevent siblings
• There’s No Such Thing as Qualitative Sustainability
• Donald Trump saves CitiBike, proving that selfishness and cooperation are no longer opposed
• Cognitive Ethology and Cat Companionship
• I receive funding to initiate the WmD Project
• If sloths endure costs to maintain closed-loop agricultural systems, why can’t we?
• String Theory: should we care?
• Okay, I admit it: I am a bit of a Neanderthal
• Model evidence that third party punishment only makes sense in tight-knit groups
• How understanding social evolution might help treat cancer
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• Was Teilhard de Chardin the real inventor of an evolutionary approach to culture?
• Cod gone on Cape Cod
• New edited volume joins the growing collection of literature dedicated to how cooperation evolves
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• In bird reproduction, parasitism and cooperation coevolve
• Curiosity and culturomics
• CNN tackles climate change by explaining public goods games!
• Money Talking about Janet Yellen and multilevel selection
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• Can you replicate the collective adaptive value of religion without god?
• Caterpillars weaponize nicotine
• Taking risks for the data
• New fossil finds provide unique insight into the variation found in “Man the Hunted”
• Writing and record-keeping as important tools in the evolution of large-scale human cooperation
• “Brainchildren” — another way to conceptualize our devotion to cultural fitness
• Barash the gene accountant on that little economic driver called “reproduction”
• Does self organization of social networks foster cooperation in the face of cheating?
• New research suggests that chimpanzees understand that cooperation produces benefits
• Microbes may surf their way to successful cooperation
• An amazing indictment of the academic publishing industry (in which most of us participate)
• Should we emulate the cooperative and conservative habits of the sloth?
• An anecdote that illustrates the tremendous power of human network reciprocity
• Additional evidence that obesity may be due to environment, not just habits
• A tour of your diverse microbiome, and the things that might deplete that diversity
• More press for paper that de-bunks the zero determinant superiority
• My review of “Origins of Altruism and Cooperation” is published in QRB
• New evidence of whooping crane culture on the rebound
• Ethnocentric cooperation dominates humanitarian cooperation in the computer… so why does humanitarianism persist?
• Schadenfreude as an instinct born of being a social, hierarchical animal
• Cooperative child-rearing pays dividends for ruffed lemurs, irrespective of kinship
• National Geographic “The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion”
• Think the Milgram Experiments tell us something definitive about human nature? Think again!
• Zero determinant strategy is just another short-term adaptation
• Where to publish in ecology & evolution without funding for page charges
• Mammal monogamy still a mystery, but maybe more than a numbers game
• Embarking on a grand experiment in conceptual teaching
• Sketching as a way of seeing animal anatomy
• Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno
• Isabella Rossellini tackles motherhood without human pretense
• New theory explaining the prevalence of homosexuality focuses on epigenetics
• Ever wonder about the swimming pattern of sperm?
• The potential for human evolution has increased along with the population size of our species
• The benefits of a maintaining a relatively small in-group
• A spatial version of the Traveler’s Dilemma allows cooperation to persist
• Just in case you missed it the first ten times: E.O. Wilson likes group selection, Jerry Coyne does not
• Allen MacNeill predicts resolution of Ev-Coop debates
• Martin Nowak to lecture on the compatibility of god and the evolutionary process
• Understanding kin selection and reciprocity when strategies are culturally propagated
• Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
• “Earth Hour” seeks to re-focus our attention on all the earth provides
• Forward on Climate Rally seeks to shift the national dialogue on anthropogenic climate change
• Dog license dataset opens up huge potential for understanding the dog-human mutualism
• Brief NYT article on empathy in children
• Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
• Roberts Publishing releases an iPad version of their majors Evolution textbook
• Montreal art installation rewards cooperative play with musical novelty
• If your “free will” is questionable, feel free to exercise your “free won’t”
• Do our brains require endurance activity in order to function?
• Barash not so enlightening on the paradox of human homosexuality
• Multiple Intelligences theory gets some neuroscientific support
• Mishele Lesser’s Genoscapes explores the meaning of human genetics
• Freeman Dyson wins the contest, and then says the contest is stupid
• NPR provides a quick overview of the human drive to reciprocate
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• New evidence that economic cooperation existed between Vikings and Inuit
• National Geographic feature on penguin propulsion
• Does American faith in genetic determinism limit the achievement of our students?
• Further evidence that Hamilton was wrong about eusocial insects
• Making the formation of social networks more realistic also makes them more cooperative
• Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
• Slate article explores the big brain, big society connection
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• Megan Frederickson shares the wonder of ant cooperation with Toronto Library patrons
• Ready for eugenics 2.0?
• International Symposium honors the work of Lynn Margulis
• On becoming a psychopath
• Freeman Dyson calls the Prisoner’s Dilemma “an amusing toy”
• New PNAS special issue explores the developmental effects of early social environment
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• Can neuroeconomics help economics become a real science?
• Enforcing norms may be for personal gain, not to maintain social order (at least amongst Santa Barbara undergraduates)
• Think that the DNA transfer is only from parents to offspring? Think again!
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• Can proper education allow reputation to foster action on climate change?
• Lack of complete transparency presents an obstacle but not a block to cooperation
• Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, cannot triangulate punishment
• What’s ironic is that the creationists do not realize that we evolutionists might be trying to understand their success
• Agent-based modeling instead of game theory: I agree!
• Punishment, properly rewarded, can promote cooperation without corruption
• Does anthropogenic change make natives into invaders?
• Are the Sentinelese the last untouched hunter-gatherer culture?
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• Despite great press for Dyson, the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is still not the solution to human cooperation
• Rachel Carson still under attack for bringing her values to bear on her science
• Bacterial societies defy selfish gene predictions
• “School of Life” acknowledges the values in religion worth preserving
• Open and fluid, science even requires constant revision of logos
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• Infographic signs on the road to game theory understanding
• Can crocheting help save corals? Can we learn something about developmental genetics in the process?
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• Preview of the 2012 Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Climate change makes mountaineering more risky
• New evidence for gene-culture evolution in Native Americans
• Australopithecus sediba fossils reveal a more apelike diet
• Drift may be not be specific to genetic systems
• When any behavior can be modeled, real-world constraint is critical
• Experimental study of cooperation and population structure calls into question the importance of heterogeneity
• Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics hosts conference on the role of cooperation in major evolutionary transitions
• Mount Everest and the limits of play
• Additional theoretical study insists that population structure does promote cooperation
• I am finally diving into NetLogo!
• 7000 year old fossil human DNA discovered
• New fossil find pushes back the origin of bilaterally symmetrical multicellular organisms
• Matthew Zimmerman on how international relations views the evolution of groups
• High-throughput screening accelerates the rate at which evolved plant chemicals can be turned into medicine
• Changing rice from C3 to C4 in order to feed our growing population
• If your loners are truly loners they won’t punish, and cooperation thrives even in the presence of antisocial punishment
• Larry Arnhart on Singer, Bowles, and Gintis and Darwinian libertarianism
• A victory for collective action and national cooperation
• Australopithecus sediba was a C3 muncher (so say the teeth)
• Antibiotic overuse: a porcine tragedy of the commons
• Identifying the genes that gave dolphins their big brains
• Perhaps nestedness is just an artifact of ecological opportunity (and not stability)
• Condors, hunters, and the National Rifle Association
• Jerry Coyne refutes the E.O. Wilson NYT piece
• E.O. Wilson on the biological origins of sin and virtue
• A new salvo in the punishment wars: if everyone can punish, defectors triumph
• Call it “ethnocentrism” or the “green beard effect”, “tags” assist cooperation
• Sometimes our simulations have more to tell than we first see
• A final solution to the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma?
• On Being features David Sloan Wilson
• Daniel Dennett on Darwin and Turing’s “strange inversion of reasoning”
• Macroevolutionary change: do successful lineages have “evolvability” or “survivability”?
• Evolution may be too slow: British Columbia begins assisted migration of forests
• Diving bell spider fashions its own scuba tanks
• Wasps can recognize each other, by face
• National Geographic goes looking for heat-loving bacteria in a very cold place
• National Geographic feature on “Vanishing Languages”
• Shark species may be more cryptic than previously understood
• Peter Turchin on Steven Pinker’s “Grand Deception” hypotheses
• Steven Pinker makes it clear that he is not a “group selectionist”
• Are the population dynamics of Dupont’s lark dictated by multilevel selective pressures?
• Once again Jerry Coyne goes ad hominem to defend evolutionary orthodoxy
• Bird study suggests that multilevel selection theory is necessary to understand population dynamics
• Is sexual practice coevolving with our cultural technologies?
• Could differential symbiosis be a mechanism by which genetically-variable hosts speciate?
• Apparently you need to know something about rare granite erosion to understand the evolution of multicellularity
• Music evolves (culturally!) from noise to song under the influence of human selection
• Nice summary piece on the state of research into human nature and morality by Agustín Fuentes
• Turtles caught in the act provide new paleontological insights
• Tim Birkenhead on anthropomorphism and animal emotion
• David Barash illuminates the “EvoPolitics” of Darwin’s time
• Are there genetic markers for ethnicity?
• Ted Kaczynski as a scholar of resistance to technology
• Understanding the role of the Templeton Foundation in funding evolutionary biology research
• Preschoolers cooperatively rock chimps in puzzle tournament
• Prominent evolutionary biologists weigh in on whether humans can evolve into a ‘superorganism’
• Mutualistic fungus transfers nitrogen from parasitized insects to its plant host
• A competitive nominee in the “weirdest YouTube video about a theoretical biology paper” category
• Gerald Carter produces an informative video on cooperation in vampire bats
• Familiarity breeds… mutual aid (at least in some birds)
• Interesting reports from the Consilience Conference
• Jason Collins questions the utility-to-fitness conversion
• Do you need cooperation in your model to explain why there are more right-handed people?
• Once your subject becomes a continuing education class…
• Scientific American “Why We Help”
• July issue of Scientific American will feature a cover story on the evolution of cooperation
• Who is the bigger bioterrorist, man or nature?
• Self-castration sometimes turns out to be good for reproductive success
• Kandyan dwarf toad removes itself from the IUCN Red List
• Longer telomeres imparted by older fathers may forestall senescence
• Honey bees harbor a remarkably diverse community of mutualistic gut microbes
• Peacocks communicate via the (ultra)sounds they make with their feathers
• Is Alzheimer’s disease caused by prion proliferation?
• “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” exhibit at the American Museum on Natural History
• Our brains are too smart to be tricked: diet sodas just make your body crave more calories
• In case you were a skeptic: bears can count
• Freaked out grasshoppers just do not contribute to decomposition in the same manner as their more relaxed brethren
• Surprisingly, rugby can be used to understand honest signaling
• Digital organisms yield new insights into the effects of extinction on long-term phylogenetic patterns of evolution
• Is human genetic research being hampered by a failure to share data?
• New study on birds uses remote tracking to provide detailed behavioral data
• A comparison of behaviorally-based animal diseases reminds us of the kingdom in which we belong
• New comprehensive data synthesis favors a pluralistic explanation for Eurasian mammoth extinction
• Now if you could only keep your cytosine methylated you might live forever
• Bonobo sequence establishes that humans are equally but dissimilarly related to our chimpanzee relatives
• Elinor Ostrom, pioneering social scientist and scholar of cooperation, is dead at 78
• “EvoLudo” site provides tutorials on evolutionary games related to cooperation
• “Evolution and Games” site provides tutorials on cooperation theory
• Can “muppet theory” help explain behavioral heterogeneity in human social groups?
• Vampire bats: the ideal organism for studying cooperation?
• NY Times provides perspective on E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• PNAS paper explores the role of population structure in facilitating reciprocity
• Richard Dawkins on E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• David Sloan Wilson on Richard Dawkins on E.O. Wilson
• Don’t mistake having a better map for knowing where you are: new technology for sequencing fetal DNA will not lead to serious trait selection
• Understanding the effects of asymmetry and relatedness on social volunteerism
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project launches with its first release of graphic packages
• There are plenty of organs out there: more altruism would end the social dilemma of who gets available organs
• Economic Whales and their Parasites
• More flatfish transitional fossils found
• Human limits extended one step further as wingsuit diver lands without a parachute
• Larry Arnhart reviews E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• David Sloan Wilson differentiates “Evolutionary Religious Studies” from “The New Atheism”
• Peter Turchin on the “Dark Side of Cultural Evolution”
• Social Evolution Forum takes on role of social networking in human cooperation
• {Canis lupus familiaris + Homo sapiens} versus Homo neanderthalenthis?
• Is the origin of all life the gyre?
• S.E. Gould takes on sloppy use of the selfish gene metaphor
• Alife XIII conference explores the simulation of artificial life
• Why don’t other animals make better use of punishment?
• Conservation Biology that acknowledges that we can never go back
• Can cod come back?
• I knew that dog was watching me: Jennifer Verdolin confirms my worst fears
• If you don’t think that culture can make us do maladaptive things, check out “trepanning”
• Richard Sennett’s “Together” explores the history of cooperative rituals
• National Academies Press releases proceedings for “Cooperation and Conflict” colloquium
• “Open Yale” course provides the fundamentals of Game Theory for free
• John Horgan reviews Robert Trivers’ “The Folly of Fools”
• James K. Galbraith makes the connection between debt policy and social stability
• BBC covers the up side of the North Pacific plastic “garbage patch”
• Short interview with Mark Pagel in The Guardian
• Olivia Judson reviews Mark Pagel’s “Wired for Culture”
• Are dolphins on their way to domesticating humans?
• I am not the only one who likes to narrowly interpret creative works through my scientific lens
• NPR drops dumb Bell Curve segment
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: Ultimatum Game “conceptual” images
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First “sequence” images
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: New “conceptual” images
• What kind of in-group does Facebook represent?
• Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild”
• Is the European Union going rogue or playing altruist on airline emissions?
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First “examples” matrices
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First images
• Howard Rheingold TED talk urges a global movement to study cooperation
• Science in Art & Design: Justin Taylor’s “The Gospel of Anarchy”
• Costly signalling not so costly in the presence of comrades
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Eco-mysticism in the Ecology Classroom, Discontinuity in Evolutionary Theory
• Naturalistic Fallacy: 1, Sam Harris: 0
• Patterns in mussel beds may reflect interaction between individual behavior and emergent environmental patterns
• How the right wing co-opts research into the evolution of cooperation
• Rand and Nowak paper on antisocial punishment in public goods games
• Is humanity’s most dangerous technology debt?
• Martin Nowak lecture on The Evolution of Cooperation at MIT
• What can Dean Potter teach us about evolution?
• If Only Game Designers Were Scientists
• Understanding Rupert Murdoch from an Evolutionary Perspective
• Epigenetics on Leonard Lopate
• Aquaculture on Leonard Lopate
• Mexican Culture and Collective Action
• Economics and Human Satisfaction
• Easy-IPD version 1.0 released!
• “DNA” by James D. Watson
• Barash and Lipton on Bin Laden (and Us)
• NY Times way behind the times on Nature versus Nurture
• Being Clean Might Make You Allergic
• Sex and Slime on Fresh Air
• “A Paradise Built in Hell” by Rebecca Solnit
• Contemporary Human Cooperation With Non-Kin Probably No Mistake
• Cultural Evolution in a Hybrid Society
• Make Every Day Darwin Day, Minus the Darwin
• Computer-Based Tools for Teaching about Robert Axelrod’s Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments
• The beginning of sex as we know it
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• In the Light of Evolution V: Cooperation (January 7th)
• In the Light of Evolution V: Cooperation (An Abbreviated and Incomplete Social Network Analysis of the Speakers)
• E.O. Wilson’s “The Four Great Books of Darwin”
• Is the “hopelessly incomplete” fossil record a little better than we give it credit for?
• Official video of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010
• Delayed Development and Human Evolution
• Greg Graffin on The Takeaway
• Scientific American “Controlling the Brain with Light”
• The Role of Technology in Human Evolution
• National Geographic’s “Science of Dogs”
• Robert Trivers and colleagues on Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson’s “The evolution of eusociality”
• Firefighting and the Tragedy of the Commons
• Asian Carp on NPR
• The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution
• Sourcing sources of selection
• Do you still think God is good?
• Teaching evolution and game theory, simultaneously
• NPR is all up in evolution
• Evolution 2010 (Overall Impressions)
• Evolution 2010 Day 5 (June 29th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 4 (June 28th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 3 (June 27th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 2 (June 26th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 1 (June 25th)
• Darwin’s Cathedral versus The God Delusion
• The Quest for the Perfect Hive
• Consilience
• Understanding biome-level response to climate change
• National Geographic “Fatal Attraction”
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday): Afternoon sessions
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – Mutualistic Networks Symposium
• ESA 2009 Meeting Day #2 (Monday)
• Patternicity and that jerk on the cell phone
• Human Adaptation and Happiness
• Common Ground Symposium at Columbia University
• An Introduction

Evolution Education (36)

• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2019)
• I will be participating in the 2019 NCEP Teaching & Learning Studio
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2017)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2017)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2016)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2016)
• I visit Pratt’s Poetics Lab focused on play
• My first “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators” talk: next Friday at St. Francis College
• How much impact can a set of free game theory infographics have?
• W.W. Norton’s new InQuizitive partner to the Bergstrom and Dugatkin Evolution textbook
• My Evolution 2014 talk is on YouTube
• Evolution 2014: Overall Impressions
• Evolution 2014: Day 2
• Evolution 2014: Want to teach both sides? Have your students deconstruct creationist propaganda!
• Evolution 2014: EvoGrader will take the grading out of assessing student learning outcomes
• Evolution 2014: A clever way to see if creationist students understand evolutionary concepts
• Evolution 2014: The Evolution Film Festival was on fire!
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Evolution 2014: Cooperative data collection is more meaningful than individual data collection
• Evolution 2014: Darwin’s “Backyard Beagle”
• Cath Dennis publishes non-computerized classroom adaptation of Axelrod’s iPD Tournament
• I receive funding to initiate the WmD Project
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• How will I deliver conceptual understanding?
• Embarking on a grand experiment in conceptual teaching
• Roberts Publishing releases an iPad version of their majors Evolution textbook
• New assessment of scientific reasoning skills suggests that students need better inquiry-based education
• Great Michael Ruse piece on the politics of resisting religious encroachment on evolutionary biology
• A competitive nominee in the “weirdest YouTube video about a theoretical biology paper” category
• Once your subject becomes a continuing education class…
• Easy-IPD version 1.0 released!
• Make Every Day Darwin Day, Minus the Darwin
• Computer-Based Tools for Teaching about Robert Axelrod’s Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments
• The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution
• Sourcing sources of selection
• Teaching evolution and game theory, simultaneously

Evolutionary Games Infographics (8)

• How much impact can a set of free game theory infographics have?
• My Evolution 2014 talk is on YouTube
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project launches with its first release of graphic packages
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: Ultimatum Game “conceptual” images
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First “sequence” images
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: New “conceptual” images
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First “examples” matrices
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First images

Evolutionary Modeling (42)

Evolutionary Psychology (37)

• Alexandra Walling illuminates the mutual aid between evolutionary biologists and Jeffrey Epstein
• Scientific American drops special issue on “Science of Being Human”
• Is sexualization of women driven by the structure of our economy?
• My entry on the evolution of play will be added to the massive Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science
• Why Artists & Designers need Scientists: Exhibit A
• Fantastic piece on nature/nurture by Patrick F. Clarkin in TVOL
• Moral Sense III approaches, June 2nd at St. Francis College
• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• NPR features Christopher Boehm on the love-hate relationship we have people in power
• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• My article on adolescence featured in the This View of Life culture series
• Pratt students make the potential trip to Mars better designed
• Dan Ariely’s “Arming the Donkeys” podcast
• How do we know when people are actually happy?
• How the built environment influences our ability to sustain personal and environmental commitments
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• Fascinating and clever study of how personal contact norms vary by relationship
• Jonathan Haidt on the business advantage of being ethical
• That beard and deep voice may be to put him in his place, not attract her
• What’s the evolved function of curiosity?
• David Sloan Wilson on how Jeff Bezos don’t know squat about chickens (or evolution!)
• My testimonial for Gregory Tague’s “Evolution and Human Culture”
• Do creative people have “messy minds”?
• Does the ability to accumulate wealth make us value the future more?
• When it comes to sex, we are consumately proximate
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• String Theory: should we care?
• Taking risks for the data
• Barash the gene accountant on that little economic driver called “reproduction”
• An anecdote that illustrates the tremendous power of human network reciprocity
• Think the Milgram Experiments tell us something definitive about human nature? Think again!
• Multiple Intelligences theory gets some neuroscientific support
• Mishele Lesser’s Genoscapes explores the meaning of human genetics
• NPR provides a quick overview of the human drive to reciprocate
• Does American faith in genetic determinism limit the achievement of our students?
• On becoming a psychopath
• Can neuroeconomics help economics become a real science?
• Enforcing norms may be for personal gain, not to maintain social order (at least amongst Santa Barbara undergraduates)
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• “School of Life” acknowledges the values in religion worth preserving
• Mount Everest and the limits of play
• E.O. Wilson on the biological origins of sin and virtue
• Peter Turchin on Steven Pinker’s “Grand Deception” hypotheses
• Nice summary piece on the state of research into human nature and morality by Agustín Fuentes
• Understanding the role of the Templeton Foundation in funding evolutionary biology research
• Scientific American “Why We Help”
• Olivia Judson reviews Mark Pagel’s “Wired for Culture”
• Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild”
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• Science in Art & Design: Justin Taylor’s “The Gospel of Anarchy”
• Naturalistic Fallacy: 1, Sam Harris: 0
• Martin Nowak lecture on The Evolution of Cooperation at MIT
• What can Dean Potter teach us about evolution?
• Understanding Rupert Murdoch from an Evolutionary Perspective
• Economics and Human Satisfaction
• Barash and Lipton on Bin Laden (and Us)
• NY Times way behind the times on Nature versus Nurture
• “A Paradise Built in Hell” by Rebecca Solnit
• Firefighting and the Tragedy of the Commons
• The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution
• NPR is all up in evolution
• Consilience
• Patternicity and that jerk on the cell phone
• Human Adaptation and Happiness

Exaptation (1)

• Our culture is special, but not especially uncommon

Experiments (General) (10)

• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• Support the mighty Bombardier Beetle’s quest to have its genome sequenced!
• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Like boats & science?… this might be the artist’s residency for you!
• A Tribute to Dr. David Becker on the Occasion of his Retirement
• How do we know when people are actually happy?
• Is there a trade-off between reproduction and creativity?
• My personal experience that creationists gravitate to anything with even the faintest scent of scientific uncertainty (and what to do about it)
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• Cognitive Ethology and Cat Companionship
• Understanding the cascading effect of carnivore loss… before we lose all the carnivores
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• New fossil finds provide unique insight into the variation found in “Man the Hunted”
• Is human genetic research being hampered by a failure to share data?
• New study on birds uses remote tracking to provide detailed behavioral data
• Scientific American “Controlling the Brain with Light”
• Robert Trivers and colleagues on Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson’s “The evolution of eusociality”
• Steven Chillrud Visit to Pratt Institute
• Understanding biome-level response to climate change
• Human Adaptation and Happiness

Extinction (14)

• Humans arrive, other mammals shrink
• Our review paper on Late Pleistocene Extinction Modeling published in QRB!
• Okay, I admit it: I am a bit of a Neanderthal
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• Are the Sentinelese the last untouched hunter-gatherer culture?
• Condors, hunters, and the National Rifle Association
• Evolution may be too slow: British Columbia begins assisted migration of forests
• Kandyan dwarf toad removes itself from the IUCN Red List
• Digital organisms yield new insights into the effects of extinction on long-term phylogenetic patterns of evolution
• New comprehensive data synthesis favors a pluralistic explanation for Eurasian mammoth extinction
• Conservation Biology that acknowledges that we can never go back
• Can cod come back?
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Official video of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010

Fashion (4)

• STEAMplant project brings local primary school kids to Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden
• Why Artists & Designers need Scientists: Exhibit A
• What can be made by mimicking biological “assemblies”?
• What’s the meaning of professorial fashion?

Felids (5)

• Alan Rabinowitz, 1953-2018
• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• Alternative music legend Morrissey agrees to adopt 2 million feral cats in win-win for felines, Australian native fauna
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes

Fiction (1)

• Science in Art & Design: Justin Taylor’s “The Gospel of Anarchy”

Film & Video (11)

Film, Television, & Video (25)

Fluidity of Knowledge (10)

• What might we discover in the ocean twilight zone?
• America Society of Primatologists condemns H. A. and Margret Rey, calls for Curious George boycott
• My personal experience that creationists gravitate to anything with even the faintest scent of scientific uncertainty (and what to do about it)
• Review of William B. Provine’s “The ‘Random Genetic Drift’ Fallacy”
• Cognitive Ethology and Cat Companionship
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• Multiple Intelligences theory gets some neuroscientific support
• Does American faith in genetic determinism limit the achievement of our students?
• Despite great press for Dyson, the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is still not the solution to human cooperation
• Open and fluid, science even requires constant revision of logos

Food (19)

• Model suggests that warming climate will catalyze greater insect-pest crop losses
• Escape is a big risk in aquaculture
• Science and art in dialogue: Pratt Manhattan Gallery hosts Dr. Rachael Winfree
• My ecological footprint for 2015-2016
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• Food is personal, sometimes ethical, but rarely political
• Without sustainability in our diets, we won’t be sustainable
• My ecological footprint for 2014-2015
• Cod gone on Cape Cod
• Concentrated factory farming of livestock massively alters the phosphorus cycle
• Nice infographic on global and domestic food waste
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• Rogue iron fertilization? Things have gotten weird!
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Mark Bittman on the ecological imperative of eating less meat
• Changing rice from C3 to C4 in order to feed our growing population
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Pratt Envirolutions trumpets green initiatives during Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Pratt Envirolutions leads campaign for reusable containers
• Vegans and the Quest for Sanity
• Changing and not changing the way we use our agricultural land

Fossil Data (5)

• An eye is not an eye is not an eye
• Apparently you need to know something about rare granite erosion to understand the evolution of multicellularity
• Turtles caught in the act provide new paleontological insights
• New comprehensive data synthesis favors a pluralistic explanation for Eurasian mammoth extinction
• More flatfish transitional fossils found

Freshwater Ecosystems (14)

• Deep Look on nutrient transport by salmon
• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• BLUE WEEK 2017 comes to Pratt Institute
• Without sustainability in our diets, we won’t be sustainable
• Rivers, Lakes, Seas, and Environmental Justice
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology
• Concentrated factory farming of livestock massively alters the phosphorus cycle
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• Now legal, Northern California’s pot farms join the rest of agriculture in impacting water supply
• With all we know, we still know too little to reliably re-engineer ecosystems
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Want a good gauge of how much humans pollute waterways? Just measure for caffeine!
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• The ecological impacts of the BP-Deepwater Horizon oil spill quantified
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Asian Carp on NPR
• National Geographic “Fatal Attraction”
• ESA 2009 Day #1 (Sunday)

Fungi (1)

• Like to forage for mushrooms? Beware the Amanita!

Game Theory (52)

• A cool (new-ish) IPD game theory simulator!
• Arming the Donkeys on kids, parenting, and Burning Man
• How much impact can a set of free game theory infographics have?
• Like-with-like assortment plus exponential fitness increases cooperation, even under weak selection
• Asymmetrical interaction best explained by superrational rather than rational strategy
• Should altruism have an effect on your final exam score?
• E&E in A&D: The Armstrong Lie
• Our paper on a super-rational solution to the tragedy of the commons published in Scientific Reports
• Do cancer cells play cooperate in the Prisoner’s Dilemma?
• My Evolution 2014 talk is on YouTube
• Cath Dennis publishes non-computerized classroom adaptation of Axelrod’s iPD Tournament
• CNN tackles climate change by explaining public goods games!
• Does self organization of social networks foster cooperation in the face of cheating?
• More press for paper that de-bunks the zero determinant superiority
• Zero determinant strategy is just another short-term adaptation
• A spatial version of the Traveler’s Dilemma allows cooperation to persist
• Understanding kin selection and reciprocity when strategies are culturally propagated
• Freeman Dyson wins the contest, and then says the contest is stupid
• Making the formation of social networks more realistic also makes them more cooperative
• Freeman Dyson calls the Prisoner’s Dilemma “an amusing toy”
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• Can neuroeconomics help economics become a real science?
• What’s ironic is that the creationists do not realize that we evolutionists might be trying to understand their success
• Agent-based modeling instead of game theory: I agree!
• Punishment, properly rewarded, can promote cooperation without corruption
• Despite great press for Dyson, the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is still not the solution to human cooperation
• Infographic signs on the road to game theory understanding
• Experimental study of cooperation and population structure calls into question the importance of heterogeneity
• If your loners are truly loners they won’t punish, and cooperation thrives even in the presence of antisocial punishment
• Call it “ethnocentrism” or the “green beard effect”, “tags” assist cooperation
• A final solution to the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma?
• Scientific American “Why We Help”
• “EvoLudo” site provides tutorials on evolutionary games related to cooperation
• “Evolution and Games” site provides tutorials on cooperation theory
• Understanding the effects of asymmetry and relatedness on social volunteerism
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project launches with its first release of graphic packages
• “Open Yale” course provides the fundamentals of Game Theory for free
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: Ultimatum Game “conceptual” images
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First “sequence” images
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: New “conceptual” images
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First “examples” matrices
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First images
• Howard Rheingold TED talk urges a global movement to study cooperation
• Costly signalling not so costly in the presence of comrades
• Rand and Nowak paper on antisocial punishment in public goods games
• Martin Nowak lecture on The Evolution of Cooperation at MIT
• Easy-IPD version 1.0 released!
• Computer-Based Tools for Teaching about Robert Axelrod’s Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• Robert Trivers and colleagues on Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson’s “The evolution of eusociality”
• Teaching evolution and game theory, simultaneously

Gene by Environment Interactions (16)

• Don’t blame people for being obese (blame their neighborhood)
• Fantastic piece on nature/nurture by Patrick F. Clarkin in TVOL
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• Jeremy Yoder on contemporary selection for increased human height
• 0.5% to 3%: Do we now have a better sense of what makes people smart?
• Do our brains require endurance activity in order to function?
• Barash not so enlightening on the paradox of human homosexuality
• Multiple Intelligences theory gets some neuroscientific support
• Does American faith in genetic determinism limit the achievement of our students?
• Ready for eugenics 2.0?
• On becoming a psychopath
• New PNAS special issue explores the developmental effects of early social environment
• Think that the DNA transfer is only from parents to offspring? Think again!
• Epigenetics on Leonard Lopate
• “DNA” by James D. Watson
• NY Times way behind the times on Nature versus Nurture

Gene-Culture Coevolution (34)

• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2019)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2017)
• Why Artists & Designers need Scientists: Exhibit A
• Fantastic piece on nature/nurture by Patrick F. Clarkin in TVOL
• Moral Sense III approaches, June 2nd at St. Francis College
• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• I am honored to be part of Moral Sense III
• My article on adolescence featured in the This View of Life culture series
• You can check out my first Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk (at St. Francis College) on YouTube
• America Society of Primatologists condemns H. A. and Margret Rey, calls for Curious George boycott
• Great conversation at my Columbia University Population Biology Seminar talk
• My next Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk: Columbia University on March 7th, 2016
• What do we know about Cultural Transmission?
• Is there a trade-off between reproduction and creativity?
• It was an honor to talk to St. Francis College!
• My first “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators” talk: next Friday at St. Francis College
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• Jeremy Yoder on contemporary selection for increased human height
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• Anne-Marie Slaughter on the tradeoff between work and caregiving
• When it comes to sex, we are consumately proximate
• The most fundamental way in which culture pushes against biology
• Explaining the evolutionary explanation for handedness
• “Brainchildren” — another way to conceptualize our devotion to cultural fitness
• Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
• Dog license dataset opens up huge potential for understanding the dog-human mutualism
• Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
• Do our brains require endurance activity in order to function?
• Mishele Lesser’s Genoscapes explores the meaning of human genetics
• New evidence for gene-culture evolution in Native Americans
• On Being features David Sloan Wilson
• Are there genetic markers for ethnicity?
• Social Evolution Forum takes on role of social networking in human cooperation
• Olivia Judson reviews Mark Pagel’s “Wired for Culture”

General Education (3)

• I will be a 2019-2020 Center for Teaching & Learning Fellow
• Transfer of Learning FLC to present at Pratt lunch event
• The argument against editing students’ drafts of written work

Genetic Drift (2)

• Review of William B. Provine’s “The ‘Random Genetic Drift’ Fallacy”
• Drift may be not be specific to genetic systems

Genetic Engineering (4)

• Ready for eugenics 2.0?
• Changing rice from C3 to C4 in order to feed our growing population
• Don’t mistake having a better map for knowing where you are: new technology for sequencing fetal DNA will not lead to serious trait selection
• Scientific American “Controlling the Brain with Light”

Genetics (39)

• Why Artists & Designers need Scientists: Exhibit A
• Fantastic piece on nature/nurture by Patrick F. Clarkin in TVOL
• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• Support the mighty Bombardier Beetle’s quest to have its genome sequenced!
• Another great Skeptoid episode, this one on race
• FDA investigators raid American Society of Human Genetics offices in Carl Zimmer cloning case
• Personalized DNA tests likely to provide further evidence of human inter-connectedness
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• Jeremy Yoder on contemporary selection for increased human height
• Review of William B. Provine’s “The ‘Random Genetic Drift’ Fallacy”
• E&E in A&D: Genetic profiling as art?
• Do humans form genetically similar social groups independent of kinship?
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• 0.5% to 3%: Do we now have a better sense of what makes people smart?
• Okay, I admit it: I am a bit of a Neanderthal
• Taking risks for the data
• Barash the gene accountant on that little economic driver called “reproduction”
• Mammal monogamy still a mystery, but maybe more than a numbers game
• New theory explaining the prevalence of homosexuality focuses on epigenetics
• The potential for human evolution has increased along with the population size of our species
• Barash not so enlightening on the paradox of human homosexuality
• Multiple Intelligences theory gets some neuroscientific support
• Mishele Lesser’s Genoscapes explores the meaning of human genetics
• Does American faith in genetic determinism limit the achievement of our students?
• Ready for eugenics 2.0?
• Think that the DNA transfer is only from parents to offspring? Think again!
• Can crocheting help save corals? Can we learn something about developmental genetics in the process?
• 7000 year old fossil human DNA discovered
• High-throughput screening accelerates the rate at which evolved plant chemicals can be turned into medicine
• Changing rice from C3 to C4 in order to feed our growing population
• Identifying the genes that gave dolphins their big brains
• Are there genetic markers for ethnicity?
• Longer telomeres imparted by older fathers may forestall senescence
• Is human genetic research being hampered by a failure to share data?
• Now if you could only keep your cytosine methylated you might live forever
• Don’t mistake having a better map for knowing where you are: new technology for sequencing fetal DNA will not lead to serious trait selection
• S.E. Gould takes on sloppy use of the selfish gene metaphor
• NPR drops dumb Bell Curve segment
• Epigenetics on Leonard Lopate
• “DNA” by James D. Watson
• NY Times way behind the times on Nature versus Nurture
• Scientific American “Controlling the Brain with Light”

Geography (6)

• I will present my EnviroAtlas class activities at NCSE 2018
• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Dog license dataset opens up huge potential for understanding the dog-human mutualism

Geology (4)

• Maybe human impacts aren’t so dramatic (when experienced from the geologic time scale)
• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology
• Was Teilhard de Chardin the real inventor of an evolutionary approach to culture?
• Apparently you need to know something about rare granite erosion to understand the evolution of multicellularity

Grants & Funding (9)

Grasslands (6)

• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• National Geographic “The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion”
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Production on marginal lands can meet only 25% of our biofuel mandates
• National Geographic “Wolf Wars”

Green Design (10)

• STEAMplant project brings local primary school kids to Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden
• 2016 Sustainability Summit live on Pratt’s Video Site
• Julia Buntaine explores the potential power of art and science collaborations
• Want to know where NYC’s water supply stands? There’s a DEP page for that!
• Biophotovoltaics: a promising design innovation, or a great example of lack of quantitative design?
• I am honored to be visiting the Green Meadow Waldorf School as part of their week-long Sustainability workshop
• Can good design make highways less of a problem?
• There’s No Such Thing as Qualitative Sustainability
• Should we emulate the cooperative and conservative habits of the sloth?
• 2012 Sustainability Crash Course at Pratt Institute

Greenwashing (8)

• Are big corporate polluters trying to “artwash” their image?
• There’s No Such Thing as Qualitative Sustainability
• New glacial maximum on Mount ARC provides definitive evidence that Pratt’s sustainability efforts are working
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• Pratt Envirolutions Students Bring Recycling Bins to Campus
• 2012 Sustainability Crash Course at Pratt Institute
• Reclaiming a Rigorous Definition of “Sustainability”
• Quantitative Sustainability and the practice of Life Cycle Analysis

Group Selection (44)

• Scientific American drops special issue on “Science of Being Human”
• All it takes to get a little specialized is a small increase in group size…
• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• Group phenotypic composition: implications for individuals and their groups
• David Sloan Wilson on how Jeff Bezos don’t know squat about chickens (or evolution!)
• Have we outgrown the scale of cooperation supported by the Big Gods of Big Religion?
• Can we resolve the ‘group selection debate’ by focusing on human cooperation?
• E&E in A&D: The Armstrong Lie
• Do humans form genetically similar social groups independent of kinship?
• Evolution 2014: Evolution of cooperation in the high school classroom? You bet!
• Can you replicate the collective adaptive value of religion without god?
• Writing and record-keeping as important tools in the evolution of large-scale human cooperation
• My review of “Origins of Altruism and Cooperation” is published in QRB
• Just in case you missed it the first ten times: E.O. Wilson likes group selection, Jerry Coyne does not
• Allen MacNeill predicts resolution of Ev-Coop debates
• Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
• Barash not so enlightening on the paradox of human homosexuality
• Freeman Dyson wins the contest, and then says the contest is stupid
• Freeman Dyson calls the Prisoner’s Dilemma “an amusing toy”
• Enforcing norms may be for personal gain, not to maintain social order (at least amongst Santa Barbara undergraduates)
• Can proper education allow reputation to foster action on climate change?
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Matthew Zimmerman on how international relations views the evolution of groups
• Jerry Coyne refutes the E.O. Wilson NYT piece
• Peter Turchin on Steven Pinker’s “Grand Deception” hypotheses
• Steven Pinker makes it clear that he is not a “group selectionist”
• Are the population dynamics of Dupont’s lark dictated by multilevel selective pressures?
• Once again Jerry Coyne goes ad hominem to defend evolutionary orthodoxy
• Understanding the role of the Templeton Foundation in funding evolutionary biology research
• Interesting reports from the Consilience Conference
• Scientific American “Why We Help”
• NY Times provides perspective on E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• Richard Dawkins on E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• Howard Rheingold TED talk urges a global movement to study cooperation
• Science in Art & Design: Justin Taylor’s “The Gospel of Anarchy”
• Costly signalling not so costly in the presence of comrades
• Martin Nowak lecture on The Evolution of Cooperation at MIT
• Contemporary Human Cooperation With Non-Kin Probably No Mistake
• Robert Trivers and colleagues on Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson’s “The evolution of eusociality”
• Do you still think God is good?
• Darwin’s Cathedral versus The God Delusion

Group Territorial Behavior (1)

• Working on a VUE concept map of the fieldTest simulation

Habitat Destruction (32)

• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• BLUE WEEK 2017 comes to Pratt Institute
• Science and art in dialogue: Pratt Manhattan Gallery hosts Dr. Rachael Winfree
• Skeptoid podcast on Colony Collapse Disorder
• My ecological footprint for 2016-2017
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• “Science: A Candle in the Dark” podcast on Urban Ecology
• “In Defense of Plants” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the return of five-lined skinks
• Charismatic megafauna offer protection to their less appealing heterospecifics
• Without sustainability in our diets, we won’t be sustainable
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on synanthropes and urban island castaways
• Are big corporate polluters trying to “artwash” their image?
• Carrying capacity — but not growth rate — varies with habitat quality (at least for moose)
• So much for the big-brained city bird theory?
• Rivers, Lakes, Seas, and Environmental Justice
• Sadly, the Population Bombers (mostly) still don’t get it
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology
• Now legal, Northern California’s pot farms join the rest of agriculture in impacting water supply
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• Would a different term make us better appreciate ecosystem services?
• With all we know, we still know too little to reliably re-engineer ecosystems
• New evidence of whooping crane culture on the rebound
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Rob Nixon on Rachel Carson’s prescience
• Does anthropogenic change make natives into invaders?
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• The ecological impacts of the BP-Deepwater Horizon oil spill quantified
• Evolution may be too slow: British Columbia begins assisted migration of forests
• Extensive long-term studies document the effect of biodiversity in ecosystem productivity
• The Australian Government blocks coal mine to protect the Great Barrier Reef

Habitat Fragmentation (9)

• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Science and art in dialogue: Pratt Manhattan Gallery hosts Dr. Rachael Winfree
• “Science: A Candle in the Dark” podcast on Urban Ecology
• “In Defense of Plants” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the return of five-lined skinks
• Without sustainability in our diets, we won’t be sustainable
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on synanthropes and urban island castaways
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• Can good design make highways less of a problem?

Happiness (8)

• Why Artists & Designers need Scientists: Exhibit A
• How do we know when people are actually happy?
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• Science in Art & Design: Justin Taylor’s “The Gospel of Anarchy”
• What can Dean Potter teach us about evolution?
• Economics and Human Satisfaction
• Human Adaptation and Happiness

Health & Medicine (12)

Higher Education (52)

• I will be a 2019-2020 Center for Teaching & Learning Fellow
• An analysis of my course evaluations (Spring 2019)
• How does this professor really spend his work time? (Spring 2019)
• I will be participating in the 2019 NCEP Teaching & Learning Studio
• How does this professor really spend his work time? (Fall 2018)
• I will present my EnviroAtlas class activities at NCSE 2018
• Pratt Math & Science Department conducts search for new Chairperson
• Transfer of Learning FLC to present at Pratt lunch event
• Hey, ho, Portland Oregon ESA 2017, let’s go!
• The argument against editing students’ drafts of written work
• What in Darwin’s name was I thinking? (#001)
• Celebrating Studio Days (Fall 2016)
• The question is how — not whether — students use electronic devices in the classroom
• An interesting model for ditching the deadline
• An analysis of my course evaluations for Spring 2016
• A Tribute to Dr. David Becker on the Occasion of his Retirement
• Students succeed in convincing the Pratt Board of Trustees to divest from fossil fuels
• What’s the meaning of professorial fashion?
• End: Sabbatical; Resume: Teaching
• Higher education teaching loads are about economics, not valuing teaching
• What open access evangelists often miss about the task at hand
• Is there any way to get students to come to class on time?
• Are there better ways of using course evaluations?
• Would killing my final exam make my class more memorable?
• Pedagogical modeling in the higher education classroom
• A niche with the masses?
• Tenured and mostly a teacher? I think that is already happening, whether or not we admit it.
• Do our students only respond to high-stakes testing?
• Sabbatical, Sweet Sabbatical
• I am taking my semester of rest… come Fall 2015
• Scientific American down on memorization
• Today I am Associate Professor
• A modest presentation on Open Information Environments
• Recommendations for creating a more student-centered classroom
• Evolution 2014: Day 2
• Evolution 2014: Want to teach both sides? Have your students deconstruct creationist propaganda!
• Evolution 2014: EvoGrader will take the grading out of assessing student learning outcomes
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Open Information Environments and the 21st Century College Classroom
• It appears that Pratt is going to keep me
• Are MOOCs just the clunky starting place for a more evolved form of new teaching?
• I will participate in a roundtable discussion on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
• Are MOOCs and the arts incompatible?
• For the next eight months, the future of my career is (mostly) out of my hands
• Recognizing the difference between what the big and small educational institutions offer
• Is this site good enough to clone?
• My decision to make my course evaluations public
• Embarking on a grand experiment in conceptual teaching
• As the nature of university-level teaching changes, should we re-assess the credit hour?
• New assessment of scientific reasoning skills suggests that students need better inquiry-based education
• Bruce B. Henderson on the unappreciated importance of “consumatory scholarship”
• “Open Yale” course provides the fundamentals of Game Theory for free

History (9)

• Crucial climate talks in Paris take place in a socially repressive environment
• Darwin in social context? Ric Brown’s fascinating survey of some important contemporaries
• Have we outgrown the scale of cooperation supported by the Big Gods of Big Religion?
• Evolution 2014: Darwin’s “Backyard Beagle”
• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• “A Paradise Built in Hell” by Rebecca Solnit
• E.O. Wilson’s “The Four Great Books of Darwin”

Homo species (12)

• Different hominin species not so species-like it seems
• Okay, I admit it: I am a bit of a Neanderthal
• Was Teilhard de Chardin the real inventor of an evolutionary approach to culture?
• New fossil finds provide unique insight into the variation found in “Man the Hunted”
• Ready for eugenics 2.0?
• Australopithecus sediba fossils reveal a more apelike diet
• 7000 year old fossil human DNA discovered
• Australopithecus sediba was a C3 muncher (so say the teeth)
• {Canis lupus familiaris + Homo sapiens} versus Homo neanderthalenthis?
• “DNA” by James D. Watson
• E.O. Wilson’s “The Four Great Books of Darwin”
• Delayed Development and Human Evolution

Host-Pathogen Evolution (12)

• Can understanding cooperation lead to higher-yield crops?
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• New report on drug resistance highlights the tragedy of our antibiotics commons
• Zoonosis, Ebola, and the Elusive Reservoir Host
• Evolution 2014: Day 1
• Evolution 2014: Could the right symbionts provide protection from chytrid infection to amphibians?
• Evolution 2014: Aphids protect themselves from parasitoids by harboring a bacteria whose viral parasite is toxic
• Hawaiian crickets converge on the same solution to eavesdropping parasites
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• Caterpillars weaponize nicotine
• Mutualistic fungus transfers nitrogen from parasitized insects to its plant host
• Being Clean Might Make You Allergic

Human Evolution (107)

• Alexandra Walling illuminates the mutual aid between evolutionary biologists and Jeffrey Epstein
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2019)
• Humans arrive, other mammals shrink
• Scientific American drops special issue on “Science of Being Human”
• We aren’t the only gardeners on Madgascar
• Different hominin species not so species-like it seems
• Is sexualization of women driven by the structure of our economy?
• Can a realistically-parameterized model tell us why our brains are so big?
• My entry on the evolution of play will be added to the massive Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2017)
• Why Artists & Designers need Scientists: Exhibit A
• Fantastic piece on nature/nurture by Patrick F. Clarkin in TVOL
• Moral Sense III approaches, June 2nd at St. Francis College
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2017)
• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• I am honored to be part of Moral Sense III
• NPR features Christopher Boehm on the love-hate relationship we have people in power
• Another great Skeptoid episode, this one on race
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2016)
• Maybe human impacts aren’t so dramatic (when experienced from the geologic time scale)
• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• Arming the Donkeys on kids, parenting, and Burning Man
• My article on adolescence featured in the This View of Life culture series
• Pratt students make the potential trip to Mars better designed
• A potentially interesting Evolution of Play documentary
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2016)
• You can check out my first Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk (at St. Francis College) on YouTube
• Soon-to-be released Evolution and Human Culture book to feature my testimonial
• America Society of Primatologists condemns H. A. and Margret Rey, calls for Curious George boycott
• Great conversation at my Columbia University Population Biology Seminar talk
• My next Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk: Columbia University on March 7th, 2016
• I visit Pratt’s Poetics Lab focused on play
• Dan Ariely’s “Arming the Donkeys” podcast
• What do we know about Cultural Transmission?
• How do we know when people are actually happy?
• Is there a trade-off between reproduction and creativity?
• How the built environment influences our ability to sustain personal and environmental commitments
• Personalized DNA tests likely to provide further evidence of human inter-connectedness
• It was an honor to talk to St. Francis College!
• My first “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators” talk: next Friday at St. Francis College
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• Jeremy Yoder on contemporary selection for increased human height
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• Fascinating and clever study of how personal contact norms vary by relationship
• Jonathan Haidt on the business advantage of being ethical
• That beard and deep voice may be to put him in his place, not attract her
• What’s the evolved function of curiosity?
• David Sloan Wilson on how Jeff Bezos don’t know squat about chickens (or evolution!)
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• My testimonial for Gregory Tague’s “Evolution and Human Culture”
• Anne-Marie Slaughter on the tradeoff between work and caregiving
• Do creative people have “messy minds”?
• Does the ability to accumulate wealth make us value the future more?
• When it comes to sex, we are consumately proximate
• Our culture is special, but not especially uncommon
• Have we outgrown the scale of cooperation supported by the Big Gods of Big Religion?
• The most fundamental way in which culture pushes against biology
• Explaining the evolutionary explanation for handedness
• E&E in A&D: Genetic profiling as art?
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• A nice synopsis of some reasons for laughter
• Do humans form genetically similar social groups independent of kinship?
• Apparently I should stop holding my breath for the Google Translate “dolphin” module
• David Haig suggests that babies cry at night to prevent siblings
• String Theory: should we care?
• Okay, I admit it: I am a bit of a Neanderthal
• Was Teilhard de Chardin the real inventor of an evolutionary approach to culture?
• Taking risks for the data
• New fossil finds provide unique insight into the variation found in “Man the Hunted”
• “Brainchildren” — another way to conceptualize our devotion to cultural fitness
• Barash the gene accountant on that little economic driver called “reproduction”
• New research suggests that chimpanzees understand that cooperation produces benefits
• An anecdote that illustrates the tremendous power of human network reciprocity
• Additional evidence that obesity may be due to environment, not just habits
• A tour of your diverse microbiome, and the things that might deplete that diversity
• My review of “Origins of Altruism and Cooperation” is published in QRB
• Think the Milgram Experiments tell us something definitive about human nature? Think again!
• Mammal monogamy still a mystery, but maybe more than a numbers game
• New theory explaining the prevalence of homosexuality focuses on epigenetics
• The potential for human evolution has increased along with the population size of our species
• Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
• Dog license dataset opens up huge potential for understanding the dog-human mutualism
• Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
• Do our brains require endurance activity in order to function?
• Multiple Intelligences theory gets some neuroscientific support
• Mishele Lesser’s Genoscapes explores the meaning of human genetics
• Freeman Dyson wins the contest, and then says the contest is stupid
• NPR provides a quick overview of the human drive to reciprocate
• New evidence that economic cooperation existed between Vikings and Inuit
• Does American faith in genetic determinism limit the achievement of our students?
• Slate article explores the big brain, big society connection
• Ready for eugenics 2.0?
• On becoming a psychopath
• Can neuroeconomics help economics become a real science?
• Enforcing norms may be for personal gain, not to maintain social order (at least amongst Santa Barbara undergraduates)
• Think that the DNA transfer is only from parents to offspring? Think again!
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, cannot triangulate punishment
• Are the Sentinelese the last untouched hunter-gatherer culture?
• “School of Life” acknowledges the values in religion worth preserving
• New evidence for gene-culture evolution in Native Americans
• Australopithecus sediba fossils reveal a more apelike diet
• Mount Everest and the limits of play
• 7000 year old fossil human DNA discovered
• Matthew Zimmerman on how international relations views the evolution of groups
• Australopithecus sediba was a C3 muncher (so say the teeth)
• Jerry Coyne refutes the E.O. Wilson NYT piece
• E.O. Wilson on the biological origins of sin and virtue
• On Being features David Sloan Wilson
• Peter Turchin on Steven Pinker’s “Grand Deception” hypotheses
• Nice summary piece on the state of research into human nature and morality by Agustín Fuentes
• Are there genetic markers for ethnicity?
• Understanding the role of the Templeton Foundation in funding evolutionary biology research
• Preschoolers cooperatively rock chimps in puzzle tournament
• Prominent evolutionary biologists weigh in on whether humans can evolve into a ‘superorganism’
• Scientific American “Why We Help”
• Longer telomeres imparted by older fathers may forestall senescence
• Our brains are too smart to be tricked: diet sodas just make your body crave more calories
• A comparison of behaviorally-based animal diseases reminds us of the kingdom in which we belong
• Bonobo sequence establishes that humans are equally but dissimilarly related to our chimpanzee relatives
• Richard Dawkins on E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• David Sloan Wilson on Richard Dawkins on E.O. Wilson
• Peter Turchin on the “Dark Side of Cultural Evolution”
• Social Evolution Forum takes on role of social networking in human cooperation
• {Canis lupus familiaris + Homo sapiens} versus Homo neanderthalenthis?
• John Horgan reviews Robert Trivers’ “The Folly of Fools”
• Olivia Judson reviews Mark Pagel’s “Wired for Culture”
• Are dolphins on their way to domesticating humans?
• Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild”
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• Science in Art & Design: Justin Taylor’s “The Gospel of Anarchy”
• Naturalistic Fallacy: 1, Sam Harris: 0
• How the right wing co-opts research into the evolution of cooperation
• Is humanity’s most dangerous technology debt?
• Martin Nowak lecture on The Evolution of Cooperation at MIT
• What can Dean Potter teach us about evolution?
• Understanding Rupert Murdoch from an Evolutionary Perspective
• Economics and Human Satisfaction
• “DNA” by James D. Watson
• Barash and Lipton on Bin Laden (and Us)
• NY Times way behind the times on Nature versus Nurture
• Being Clean Might Make You Allergic
• “A Paradise Built in Hell” by Rebecca Solnit
• Contemporary Human Cooperation With Non-Kin Probably No Mistake
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• E.O. Wilson’s “The Four Great Books of Darwin”
• Delayed Development and Human Evolution
• The Role of Technology in Human Evolution
• National Geographic’s “Science of Dogs”
• Robert Trivers and colleagues on Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson’s “The evolution of eusociality”
• Firefighting and the Tragedy of the Commons
• The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution
• NPR is all up in evolution
• Darwin’s Cathedral versus The God Delusion
• Consilience
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday): Afternoon sessions
• Patternicity and that jerk on the cell phone
• Human Adaptation and Happiness

Human limits (5)

• Pratt students make the potential trip to Mars better designed
• On the verge of 400 ppm Carbon Dioxide: a symbolic threshold
• Rebranding global warming as a health threat
• Mount Everest and the limits of play
• Human limits extended one step further as wingsuit diver lands without a parachute

Human Nature (25)

• Scientific American drops special issue on “Science of Being Human”
• Is sexualization of women driven by the structure of our economy?
• Moral Sense III approaches, June 2nd at St. Francis College
• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• How the built environment influences our ability to sustain personal and environmental commitments
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• Fascinating and clever study of how personal contact norms vary by relationship
• Jonathan Haidt on the business advantage of being ethical
• David Sloan Wilson on how Jeff Bezos don’t know squat about chickens (or evolution!)
• Does the ability to accumulate wealth make us value the future more?
• Taking risks for the data
• Think the Milgram Experiments tell us something definitive about human nature? Think again!
• Mishele Lesser’s Genoscapes explores the meaning of human genetics
• Does American faith in genetic determinism limit the achievement of our students?
• E.O. Wilson on the biological origins of sin and virtue
• Nice summary piece on the state of research into human nature and morality by Agustín Fuentes
• Understanding the role of the Templeton Foundation in funding evolutionary biology research
• Scientific American “Why We Help”
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• Science in Art & Design: Justin Taylor’s “The Gospel of Anarchy”
• Naturalistic Fallacy: 1, Sam Harris: 0
• Barash and Lipton on Bin Laden (and Us)
• NY Times way behind the times on Nature versus Nurture
• “A Paradise Built in Hell” by Rebecca Solnit
• Consilience

Human Uniqueness (43)

• Scientific American drops special issue on “Science of Being Human”
• We aren’t the only gardeners on Madgascar
• Moral Sense III approaches, June 2nd at St. Francis College
• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• A potentially interesting Evolution of Play documentary
• You can check out my first Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk (at St. Francis College) on YouTube
• Soon-to-be released Evolution and Human Culture book to feature my testimonial
• Great conversation at my Columbia University Population Biology Seminar talk
• My next Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk: Columbia University on March 7th, 2016
• I visit Pratt’s Poetics Lab focused on play
• Dan Ariely’s “Arming the Donkeys” podcast
• It was an honor to talk to St. Francis College!
• My first “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators” talk: next Friday at St. Francis College
• Jonathan Haidt on the business advantage of being ethical
• That beard and deep voice may be to put him in his place, not attract her
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• My testimonial for Gregory Tague’s “Evolution and Human Culture”
• When it comes to sex, we are consumately proximate
• Our culture is special, but not especially uncommon
• Have we outgrown the scale of cooperation supported by the Big Gods of Big Religion?
• A nice synopsis of some reasons for laughter
• Apparently I should stop holding my breath for the Google Translate “dolphin” module
• String Theory: should we care?
• Okay, I admit it: I am a bit of a Neanderthal
• Was Teilhard de Chardin the real inventor of an evolutionary approach to culture?
• Taking risks for the data
• New research suggests that chimpanzees understand that cooperation produces benefits
• An anecdote that illustrates the tremendous power of human network reciprocity
• My review of “Origins of Altruism and Cooperation” is published in QRB
• Mammal monogamy still a mystery, but maybe more than a numbers game
• Dog license dataset opens up huge potential for understanding the dog-human mutualism
• Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
• Do our brains require endurance activity in order to function?
• Mishele Lesser’s Genoscapes explores the meaning of human genetics
• Slate article explores the big brain, big society connection
• Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, cannot triangulate punishment
• Preschoolers cooperatively rock chimps in puzzle tournament
• Prominent evolutionary biologists weigh in on whether humans can evolve into a ‘superorganism’
• Bonobo sequence establishes that humans are equally but dissimilarly related to our chimpanzee relatives
• Richard Dawkins on E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• David Sloan Wilson on Richard Dawkins on E.O. Wilson
• Olivia Judson reviews Mark Pagel’s “Wired for Culture”
• Are dolphins on their way to domesticating humans?

Hunger (3)

• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Changing and not changing the way we use our agricultural land

Hydrology (1)

• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology

Hymenoptera (2)

• Science and art in dialogue: Pratt Manhattan Gallery hosts Dr. Rachael Winfree
• Further evidence that Hamilton was wrong about eusocial insects

Hypothesis Testing (7)

• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• Is there a trade-off between reproduction and creativity?
• My personal experience that creationists gravitate to anything with even the faintest scent of scientific uncertainty (and what to do about it)
• Cognitive Ethology and Cat Companionship
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• Slate article explores the big brain, big society connection

Individual-based Models (18)

• Can a realistically-parameterized model tell us why our brains are so big?
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• How understanding social evolution might help treat cancer
• Ethnocentric cooperation dominates humanitarian cooperation in the computer… so why does humanitarianism persist?
• Zero determinant strategy is just another short-term adaptation
• Working on a VUE concept map of the fieldTest simulation
• My review of Railsback and Grimm’s “Agent-based and individual-based modeling” textbook published in Ecology
• Agent-based modeling instead of game theory: I agree!
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• ESA 2012 Workshop #8, Getting off the Ground with Individual-Based Modeling: A Primer for Instructors and Researchers
• I am finally diving into NetLogo!
• Steven Railsback and Volker Grimm offer new introduction to the process of agent- and individual-based modeling
• Costly signalling not so costly in the presence of comrades
• Patterns in mussel beds may reflect interaction between individual behavior and emergent environmental patterns
• If Only Game Designers Were Scientists
• Computer-Based Tools for Teaching about Robert Axelrod’s Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – “Big Models” Special Session

Industrial Design (3)

• Why Artists & Designers need Scientists: Exhibit A
• Julia Buntaine explores the potential power of art and science collaborations
• Pratt students make the potential trip to Mars better designed

Information Design (22)

• When it comes to considering sex and gender, don’t forget sex determination
• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• How much impact can a set of free game theory infographics have?
• My new favorite concept mapping activity: depicting whole-system ecological flows
• NYC Solar Map: a powerful tool for transformation to a solar future
• Basic instructions for making effective concept maps using VUE
• Ben Knight’s “Phyletic gradualism / Punctuated equilibrium”
• My Evolution 2014 talk is on YouTube
• Interesting numbers on the sustainability (or lack thereof) of the aviation industry
• Nice infographic on global and domestic food waste
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Working on a VUE concept map of the fieldTest simulation
• Green port policies yield big decreases in the ecological footprint of shipping
• Infographic signs on the road to game theory understanding
• PNAS paper explores the role of population structure in facilitating reciprocity
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project launches with its first release of graphic packages
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: Ultimatum Game “conceptual” images
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First “sequence” images
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: New “conceptual” images
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First “examples” matrices
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First images
• Proper set-up for Concept Mapping with VUE

Information Literacy (3)

• How stupid professorial attitudes towards Wikipedia are making students less savvy
• Scientific American down on memorization
• A modest presentation on Open Information Environments

Installation Art (3)

• Science and art in dialogue: Pratt Manhattan Gallery hosts Dr. Rachael Winfree
• Julia Buntaine explores the potential power of art and science collaborations
• Montreal art installation rewards cooperative play with musical novelty

Intelligences (6)

• FDA investigators raid American Society of Human Genetics offices in Carl Zimmer cloning case
• Do creative people have “messy minds”?
• 0.5% to 3%: Do we now have a better sense of what makes people smart?
• Multiple Intelligences theory gets some neuroscientific support
• When any behavior can be modeled, real-world constraint is critical
• Are dolphins on their way to domesticating humans?

Interactions (14)

Interdisciplinarity (5)

• The first product of a three-year-long Faculty Learning Community project
• “Mount H-Index”: I never made it to base camp, and I have still had some great adventures
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• Consilience

Intertidal Zones (3)

• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• EcoMotion studios celebrates Robert Paine’s Pisaster experiments
• Patterns in mussel beds may reflect interaction between individual behavior and emergent environmental patterns

Intrinsic Growth Rate (3)

• Eco 101: Exponential Growth & Decay
• My first “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators” talk: next Friday at St. Francis College
• Carrying capacity — but not growth rate — varies with habitat quality (at least for moose)

Invasive Species (19)

• Escape is a big risk in aquaculture
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• Skeptoid podcast on Colony Collapse Disorder
• Alternative music legend Morrissey agrees to adopt 2 million feral cats in win-win for felines, Australian native fauna
• Like to forage for mushrooms? Beware the Amanita!
• “In Defense of Plants” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the return of five-lined skinks
• Evolution 2014: Could the right symbionts provide protection from chytrid infection to amphibians?
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Does anthropogenic change make natives into invaders?
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• Fences exclude invasive predators, give aid to threatened Hawaiian birds
• Will invasive truffles become the bane of European epicures?
• Saving Puffins, One Clip at a Time
• Official video of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010
• Asian Carp on NPR

Keystone Species (6)

• Deep Look on nutrient transport by salmon
• EcoMotion studios celebrates Robert Paine’s Pisaster experiments
• New article in Science provides a comprehensive overview and update on Yellowstone National Park
• Understanding the cascading effect of carnivore loss… before we lose all the carnivores
• Megan Frederickson shares the wonder of ant cooperation with Toronto Library patrons
• The humble Mistletoe turns out to be a probable keystone species

Kin Selection (21)

• Mom: “Eat my sh*t and then help your younger siblings”
• Mom leaves, offspring get buff and work together
• Great conversation at my Columbia University Population Biology Seminar talk
• The often-large difference between “breeding” and “parenting”
• Rule number one of cooperative bacterial warfare? Be in the majority.
• Do humans form genetically similar social groups independent of kinship?
• My review of “Origins of Altruism and Cooperation” is published in QRB
• Ethnocentric cooperation dominates humanitarian cooperation in the computer… so why does humanitarianism persist?
• Cooperative child-rearing pays dividends for ruffed lemurs, irrespective of kinship
• National Geographic “The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion”
• Just in case you missed it the first ten times: E.O. Wilson likes group selection, Jerry Coyne does not
• Allen MacNeill predicts resolution of Ev-Coop debates
• Understanding kin selection and reciprocity when strategies are culturally propagated
• Barash not so enlightening on the paradox of human homosexuality
• Steven Pinker makes it clear that he is not a “group selectionist”
• Once again Jerry Coyne goes ad hominem to defend evolutionary orthodoxy
• Scientific American “Why We Help”
• Understanding the effects of asymmetry and relatedness on social volunteerism
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• Martin Nowak lecture on The Evolution of Cooperation at MIT
• Contemporary Human Cooperation With Non-Kin Probably No Mistake

Language Evolution (3)

• Fantastic piece on nature/nurture by Patrick F. Clarkin in TVOL
• Apparently I should stop holding my breath for the Google Translate “dolphin” module
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”

Law (9)

• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• China shifts a failed cultural policy designed to stabilize population
• Court Ruling in the Netherlands may point the way to cracking the climate compliance conundrum
• In the end, climate compromise comes down to writing and editing
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• Now legal, Northern California’s pot farms join the rest of agriculture in impacting water supply
• A victory for collective action and national cooperation
• Should conservation scientists also be advocates for particular policies?
• Is this what free-market conservation looks like?

Learning Management Systems (5)

• How Moodle allows you to remove your bias when grading quizzes
• I’ll be spreading the Learning Management System love at Pratt in early November
• My new favorite concept mapping activity: depicting whole-system ecological flows
• I will participate in a roundtable discussion on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
• Moving away from textbooks

Lesson Ideas (17)

• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2019)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2017)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2017)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2016)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2016)
• My new favorite concept mapping activity: depicting whole-system ecological flows
• Basic instructions for making effective concept maps using VUE
• Evolution 2014: Want to teach both sides? Have your students deconstruct creationist propaganda!
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Evolution 2014: Cooperative data collection is more meaningful than individual data collection
• Concept mapping as a creative tool
• Online tools for teaching the basics of population growth
• Easy-IPD version 1.0 released!
• Computer-Based Tools for Teaching about Robert Axelrod’s Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments
• Sourcing sources of selection
• Teaching evolution and game theory, simultaneously
• Moving away from textbooks

Life Cycle Analysis (6)

• Envirolutions brings bottle transformation to Green Week 2015
• There’s No Such Thing as Qualitative Sustainability
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• 2012 Sustainability Crash Course at Pratt Institute
• Crade-to-Cradle
• Quantitative Sustainability and the practice of Life Cycle Analysis

Linguistics (1)

• Apparently I should stop holding my breath for the Google Translate “dolphin” module

Long Term Ecological Research (4)

• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• Understanding the cascading effect of carnivore loss… before we lose all the carnivores
• Understanding biome-level response to climate change
• Human Adaptation and Happiness

Macroecology (3)

• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• Macroecologists weigh in on how well sustainability science considers ecological limits
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday): Afternoon sessions

Macroevolution (6)

• Evolution beyond adaptation: a critical step for evolutionary theory
• Ben Knight’s “Phyletic gradualism / Punctuated equilibrium”
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics hosts conference on the role of cooperation in major evolutionary transitions
• New fossil find pushes back the origin of bilaterally symmetrical multicellular organisms
• Macroevolutionary change: do successful lineages have “evolvability” or “survivability”?

Mammals (2)

• Break not the ungulate culture of migration
• Humans arrive, other mammals shrink

Mangrove Forests (2)

• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Aquaculture on Leonard Lopate

Marine Ecosystems (29)

• Are corals riding ocean currents to exert climate change dominance over macroalgae?
• What might we discover in the ocean twilight zone?
• PBS’ Deep Look on mole crabs
• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• BLUE WEEK 2017 comes to Pratt Institute
• Like boats & science?… this might be the artist’s residency for you!
• 2016 Sustainability Summit live on Pratt’s Video Site
• While we vacuum the seas, we may as well clean them of debris…
• Why the “just burn it all” approach to ending fossil fuel dependence does not work
• Without sustainability in our diets, we won’t be sustainable
• EcoMotion studios celebrates Robert Paine’s Pisaster experiments
• WmD Episode #00003 has been released
• Rivers, Lakes, Seas, and Environmental Justice
• Cod gone on Cape Cod
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno
• National Geographic feature on penguin propulsion
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• Rogue iron fertilization? Things have gotten weird!
• Rob Nixon on Rachel Carson’s prescience
• Want a good gauge of how much humans pollute waterways? Just measure for caffeine!
• Are the Sentinelese the last untouched hunter-gatherer culture?
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Would you like a few red-listed species with that shrimp cocktail sir?
• “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” exhibit at the American Museum on Natural History
• BBC covers the up side of the North Pacific plastic “garbage patch”
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Patterns in mussel beds may reflect interaction between individual behavior and emergent environmental patterns
• Aquaculture on Leonard Lopate
• Sex and Slime on Fresh Air
• Saving Puffins, One Clip at a Time
• The Cove

Mathematics (4)

• Can mathematics save us from partisan Gerrymandering?
• Steve C. Walker on optimistic but reasonable expectations for mathematics
• Martin Nowak lecture on The Evolution of Cooperation at MIT
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – “Big Models” Special Session

Mating systems (5)

• Polygyny: the culture we dislike might not be the culture that is evolutionarily disfavored
• Evolution 2014: Day 1
• Barash the gene accountant on that little economic driver called “reproduction”
• Cooperative child-rearing pays dividends for ruffed lemurs, irrespective of kinship
• Mammal monogamy still a mystery, but maybe more than a numbers game

Memetic Fitness (36)

• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• My article on adolescence featured in the This View of Life culture series
• You can check out my first Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk (at St. Francis College) on YouTube
• FDA investigators raid American Society of Human Genetics offices in Carl Zimmer cloning case
• My next Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk: Columbia University on March 7th, 2016
• What do we know about Cultural Transmission?
• Is there a trade-off between reproduction and creativity?
• My first “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators” talk: next Friday at St. Francis College
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• Crucial climate talks in Paris take place in a socially repressive environment
• Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
• Polygyny: the culture we dislike might not be the culture that is evolutionarily disfavored
• Does the ability to accumulate wealth make us value the future more?
• The most fundamental way in which culture pushes against biology
• The forces of cultural evolution push hard on political humor
• Was Teilhard de Chardin the real inventor of an evolutionary approach to culture?
• Money Talking about Janet Yellen and multilevel selection
• “Brainchildren” — another way to conceptualize our devotion to cultural fitness
• New evidence that economic cooperation existed between Vikings and Inuit
• Does American faith in genetic determinism limit the achievement of our students?
• Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
• Are the Sentinelese the last untouched hunter-gatherer culture?
• “School of Life” acknowledges the values in religion worth preserving
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• Mount Everest and the limits of play
• National Geographic feature on “Vanishing Languages”
• Peter Turchin on Steven Pinker’s “Grand Deception” hypotheses
• Steven Pinker makes it clear that he is not a “group selectionist”
• Jason Collins questions the utility-to-fitness conversion
• If you don’t think that culture can make us do maladaptive things, check out “trepanning”
• Naturalistic Fallacy: 1, Sam Harris: 0
• How the right wing co-opts research into the evolution of cooperation
• Is humanity’s most dangerous technology debt?
• What can Dean Potter teach us about evolution?
• Understanding Rupert Murdoch from an Evolutionary Perspective

Mentoring (4)

• Celebrating Studios Days Spring 2015
• Rhett Bradbury’s Master’s Thesis explores how gaming can foster political leadership
• Mishele Lesser’s Genoscapes explores the meaning of human genetics
• Molly H. Adams earns top honors from the Critical and Visual Studies program

Methods (9)

• How renewable power sources grow more trees
• Are corals riding ocean currents to exert climate change dominance over macroalgae?
• Can a realistically-parameterized model tell us why our brains are so big?
• Who was the first to catalog color? Hint: it wasn’t designers!
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• Injury intuition confirmation bias? Farce article goes really viral
• Clever study shows how cooperative bacteria sanction — and therefore exclude — cheaters
• EcoMotion studios celebrates Robert Paine’s Pisaster experiments
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• Can we resolve the ‘group selection debate’ by focusing on human cooperation?
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Our review paper on Late Pleistocene Extinction Modeling published in QRB!
• How understanding social evolution might help treat cancer
• More press for paper that de-bunks the zero determinant superiority
• Ethnocentric cooperation dominates humanitarian cooperation in the computer… so why does humanitarianism persist?
• Think the Milgram Experiments tell us something definitive about human nature? Think again!
• Zero determinant strategy is just another short-term adaptation
• Working on a VUE concept map of the fieldTest simulation
• Useful guides for writing good pseudocode
• A spatial version of the Traveler’s Dilemma allows cooperation to persist
• My review of Railsback and Grimm’s “Agent-based and individual-based modeling” textbook published in Ecology
• Freeman Dyson wins the contest, and then says the contest is stupid
• Agent-based modeling instead of game theory: I agree!
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• ESA 2012 Workshop #8, Getting off the Ground with Individual-Based Modeling: A Primer for Instructors and Researchers
• When any behavior can be modeled, real-world constraint is critical
• I am finally diving into NetLogo!
• Understanding the effects of asymmetry and relatedness on social volunteerism
• Steven Railsback and Volker Grimm offer new introduction to the process of agent- and individual-based modeling
• Costly signalling not so costly in the presence of comrades
• Patterns in mussel beds may reflect interaction between individual behavior and emergent environmental patterns
• If Only Game Designers Were Scientists
• Computer-Based Tools for Teaching about Robert Axelrod’s Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• In the Light of Evolution V: Cooperation (An Abbreviated and Incomplete Social Network Analysis of the Speakers)
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – “Big Models” Special Session

Microbial Ecology (8)

• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• Clever study shows how cooperative bacteria sanction — and therefore exclude — cheaters
• Rule number one of cooperative bacterial warfare? Be in the majority.
• Evolution 2014: Day 1
• Microbes may surf their way to successful cooperation
• Bacterial societies defy selfish gene predictions
• National Geographic goes looking for heat-loving bacteria in a very cold place
• There’s Dirt Under Them Thar Sidewalks

Minor in Sound & Music Studies (1)

Mismatch theory (17)

• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• My article on adolescence featured in the This View of Life culture series
• Pratt students make the potential trip to Mars better designed
• How the built environment influences our ability to sustain personal and environmental commitments
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• Additional evidence that obesity may be due to environment, not just habits
• A tour of your diverse microbiome, and the things that might deplete that diversity
• The potential for human evolution has increased along with the population size of our species
• Do our brains require endurance activity in order to function?
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• Mount Everest and the limits of play
• Our brains are too smart to be tricked: diet sodas just make your body crave more calories
• A comparison of behaviorally-based animal diseases reminds us of the kingdom in which we belong
• Peter Turchin on the “Dark Side of Cultural Evolution”
• Being Clean Might Make You Allergic
• “A Paradise Built in Hell” by Rebecca Solnit
• Contemporary Human Cooperation With Non-Kin Probably No Mistake

Modeling (General) (10)

• How renewable power sources grow more trees
• Are corals riding ocean currents to exert climate change dominance over macroalgae?
• Can a realistically-parameterized model tell us why our brains are so big?
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Our review paper on Late Pleistocene Extinction Modeling published in QRB!
• How understanding social evolution might help treat cancer
• More press for paper that de-bunks the zero determinant superiority
• Ethnocentric cooperation dominates humanitarian cooperation in the computer… so why does humanitarianism persist?
• Zero determinant strategy is just another short-term adaptation
• Working on a VUE concept map of the fieldTest simulation
• A spatial version of the Traveler’s Dilemma allows cooperation to persist
• My review of Railsback and Grimm’s “Agent-based and individual-based modeling” textbook published in Ecology
• Freeman Dyson wins the contest, and then says the contest is stupid
• Agent-based modeling instead of game theory: I agree!
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• ESA 2012 Workshop #8, Getting off the Ground with Individual-Based Modeling: A Primer for Instructors and Researchers
• When any behavior can be modeled, real-world constraint is critical
• I am finally diving into NetLogo!
• Understanding the effects of asymmetry and relatedness on social volunteerism
• Steven Railsback and Volker Grimm offer new introduction to the process of agent- and individual-based modeling
• Costly signalling not so costly in the presence of comrades
• Patterns in mussel beds may reflect interaction between individual behavior and emergent environmental patterns
• If Only Game Designers Were Scientists
• Computer-Based Tools for Teaching about Robert Axelrod’s Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – “Big Models” Special Session

Moodle (1)

• Moodle Tip: Using anchor links to create your own course page menu

MSCI-160, Great Adventures in Evolution (1)

MSCI-260, Evolution (10)

• STEAMplant project brings local primary school kids to Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden
• Alexandra Walling illuminates the mutual aid between evolutionary biologists and Jeffrey Epstein
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2019)
• SSE tells HHS to acknowledge sex and gender diversity
• A cool (new-ish) IPD game theory simulator!
• When it comes to considering sex and gender, don’t forget sex determination
• Break not the ungulate culture of migration
• Humans arrive, other mammals shrink
• Scientific American drops special issue on “Science of Being Human”
• Don’t blame people for being obese (blame their neighborhood)
• Mom: “Eat my sh*t and then help your younger siblings”
• Mom leaves, offspring get buff and work together
• We aren’t the only gardeners on Madgascar
• All it takes to get a little specialized is a small increase in group size…
• Different hominin species not so species-like it seems
• Parasites better watch out for parasites!
• Is sexualization of women driven by the structure of our economy?
• Can a realistically-parameterized model tell us why our brains are so big?
• Professor Jensen’s Guide to Urban Cycling
• Alan Rabinowitz, 1953-2018
• My entry on the evolution of play will be added to the massive Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science
• PBS’ Deep Look on mole crabs
• PBS’ Deep Look on Firefly communication and deception
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2017)
• Why Artists & Designers need Scientists: Exhibit A
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Fantastic piece on nature/nurture by Patrick F. Clarkin in TVOL
• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• Moral Sense III approaches, June 2nd at St. Francis College
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2017)
• Pratt News features short piece on Dr. Roland Kays’s campus visit
• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• I am honored to be part of Moral Sense III
• Support the mighty Bombardier Beetle’s quest to have its genome sequenced!
• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Hedgehogs, Raccoons, and Urbanite Biophilia
• NPR features Christopher Boehm on the love-hate relationship we have people in power
• Another great Skeptoid episode, this one on race
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2016)
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• Maybe human impacts aren’t so dramatic (when experienced from the geologic time scale)
• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• An inspiring summit, but big challenges at home and afar…
• Arming the Donkeys on kids, parenting, and Burning Man
• My article on adolescence featured in the This View of Life culture series
• Pratt students make the potential trip to Mars better designed
• A potentially interesting Evolution of Play documentary
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2016)
• You can check out my first Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk (at St. Francis College) on YouTube
• Soon-to-be released Evolution and Human Culture book to feature my testimonial
• It’s good to remember how fast things change, culturally & biologically
• What can be made by mimicking biological “assemblies”?
• FDA investigators raid American Society of Human Genetics offices in Carl Zimmer cloning case
• Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson liberated after month-long kidnapping ordeal
• America Society of Primatologists condemns H. A. and Margret Rey, calls for Curious George boycott
• Like to forage for mushrooms? Beware the Amanita!
• Great conversation at my Columbia University Population Biology Seminar talk
• My next Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk: Columbia University on March 7th, 2016
• I visit Pratt’s Poetics Lab focused on play
• Dan Ariely’s “Arming the Donkeys” podcast
• What do we know about Cultural Transmission?
• Emerging Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution releases roadmap document
• An eye is not an eye is not an eye
• Food is personal, sometimes ethical, but rarely political
• How do we know when people are actually happy?
• Understanding [culture + multilevel selection] = potential for Sustainability
• Is there a trade-off between reproduction and creativity?
• Would a “labor economy” lead to different outcomes than the “capital economy”?
• Clever study shows how cooperative bacteria sanction — and therefore exclude — cheaters
• Can understanding cooperation lead to higher-yield crops?
• How the built environment influences our ability to sustain personal and environmental commitments
• Personalized DNA tests likely to provide further evidence of human inter-connectedness
• My personal experience that creationists gravitate to anything with even the faintest scent of scientific uncertainty (and what to do about it)
• Lev Ginzburg Fest: celebration of a “retirement”
• It was an honor to talk to St. Francis College!
• My first “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators” talk: next Friday at St. Francis College
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• How much impact can a set of free game theory infographics have?
• Crucial climate talks in Paris take place in a socially repressive environment
• To be an effective critical theorist of science, it helps to understand science
• Primates — but not their rodent relatives — can infer the effects of other individuals on resource availability
• Jeremy Yoder on contemporary selection for increased human height
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• Maybe infants don’t really care who helps and who hinders after all…
• The problem with same sex attraction “for the good of the species”
• Fascinating and clever study of how personal contact norms vary by relationship
• Jonathan Haidt on the business advantage of being ethical
• That beard and deep voice may be to put him in his place, not attract her
• What’s the evolved function of curiosity?
• Review of William B. Provine’s “The ‘Random Genetic Drift’ Fallacy”
• Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
• Polygyny: the culture we dislike might not be the culture that is evolutionarily disfavored
• China shifts a failed cultural policy designed to stabilize population
• Major masts made by multiplicative modification
• Group phenotypic composition: implications for individuals and their groups
• Does the rapid spread of a culture of over-exploitation intensify our impact on wild food sources?
• Are parasites really ecologically necessary?
• The prickly (and largely unknown) sex life of bats
• David Sloan Wilson on how Jeff Bezos don’t know squat about chickens (or evolution!)
• Does Bayesian bias aid us in making adaptive distorted self-assessments?
• Malcolm Gladwell on the social contagion of mass shootings
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• Is technological evolution “de-agglomerating” cultural innovation?
• EcoMotion studios celebrates Robert Paine’s Pisaster experiments
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on synanthropes and urban island castaways
• Like-with-like assortment plus exponential fitness increases cooperation, even under weak selection
• Should we compromise with nations that hunt whales?
• My testimonial for Gregory Tague’s “Evolution and Human Culture”
• The often-large difference between “breeding” and “parenting”
• Anne-Marie Slaughter on the tradeoff between work and caregiving
• New report on drug resistance highlights the tragedy of our antibiotics commons
• Open Tree of Life allows experts and novices alike to explore “the” phylogeny
• Do creative people have “messy minds”?
• Does the ability to accumulate wealth make us value the future more?
• Formation of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution has the potential to catalyze research into how culture evolves
• When it comes to sex, we are consumately proximate
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• Evolution 2016 meeting will feature evolution-themed art exhibit
• A chance to learn how an understanding of empathy can inform design
• Asymmetrical interaction best explained by superrational rather than rational strategy
• Our culture is special, but not especially uncommon
• Have we outgrown the scale of cooperation supported by the Big Gods of Big Religion?
• The most fundamental way in which culture pushes against biology
• Rule number one of cooperative bacterial warfare? Be in the majority.
• WmD Episode #00003 has been released
• Music, the cortisone balm?
• Should altruism have an effect on your final exam score?
• Explaining the evolutionary explanation for handedness
• WmD Episode #00002 has been released
• So much for the big-brained city bird theory?
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on big animals in big cities
• Urban tree power
• Evolution beyond adaptation: a critical step for evolutionary theory
• Zoonosis, Ebola, and the Elusive Reservoir Host
• WmD Episode #00001 has been released!
• Can we resolve the ‘group selection debate’ by focusing on human cooperation?
• Sabbatical, Sweet Sabbatical
• Is the threat of regulation enough to incentivize cooperation from nitrogen polluters?
• In the end, climate compromise comes down to writing and editing
• The costly nature of wind pollination
• How stupid professorial attitudes towards Wikipedia are making students less savvy
• PCB Bioaccumulation and Polar Bear Penises
• The Big Questions in Ecology and Evolution
• E&E in A&D: Genetic profiling as art?
• E&E in A&D: The Armstrong Lie
• Our paper on a super-rational solution to the tragedy of the commons published in Scientific Reports
• The forces of cultural evolution push hard on political humor
• Scientific American down on memorization
• Review of What We Made by Tom Finkelpearl
• Water, Alfalfa, China, and a modern Tragedy of the Commons
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• Ben Knight’s “Phyletic gradualism / Punctuated equilibrium”
• A nice synopsis of some reasons for laughter
• Do humans form genetically similar social groups independent of kinship?
• Do cancer cells play cooperate in the Prisoner’s Dilemma?
• My Evolution 2014 talk is on YouTube
• Evolution 2014: Day 2
• Evolution 2014: Day 1
• Evolution 2014: Could the right symbionts provide protection from chytrid infection to amphibians?
• Evolution 2014: Are island mutualist communities more likely to be nested because they are inherently more unstable?
• Evolution 2014: Lemurs display huge diet diversity, and their gut microbes track this diversity
• Evolution 2014: Aphids protect themselves from parasitoids by harboring a bacteria whose viral parasite is toxic
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Evolution 2014: Evolution of cooperation in the high school classroom? You bet!
• Evolution 2014: Cooperative data collection is more meaningful than individual data collection
• Evolution 2014: Students can watch fly populations evolve in a matter of weeks
• Evolution 2014: Preview
• Hawaiian crickets converge on the same solution to eavesdropping parasites
• Cath Dennis publishes non-computerized classroom adaptation of Axelrod’s iPD Tournament
• Our review paper on Late Pleistocene Extinction Modeling published in QRB!
• Apparently I should stop holding my breath for the Google Translate “dolphin” module
• Is “nest parasitism” really “nest mutualism”?
• 0.5% to 3%: Do we now have a better sense of what makes people smart?
• David Haig suggests that babies cry at night to prevent siblings
• There’s No Such Thing as Qualitative Sustainability
• Donald Trump saves CitiBike, proving that selfishness and cooperation are no longer opposed
• Cognitive Ethology and Cat Companionship
• I receive funding to initiate the WmD Project
• If sloths endure costs to maintain closed-loop agricultural systems, why can’t we?
• String Theory: should we care?
• Okay, I admit it: I am a bit of a Neanderthal
• Model evidence that third party punishment only makes sense in tight-knit groups
• How understanding social evolution might help treat cancer
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• Was Teilhard de Chardin the real inventor of an evolutionary approach to culture?
• Cod gone on Cape Cod
• New edited volume joins the growing collection of literature dedicated to how cooperation evolves
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• In bird reproduction, parasitism and cooperation coevolve
• Curiosity and culturomics
• CNN tackles climate change by explaining public goods games!
• Money Talking about Janet Yellen and multilevel selection
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• Can you replicate the collective adaptive value of religion without god?
• Caterpillars weaponize nicotine
• Taking risks for the data
• New fossil finds provide unique insight into the variation found in “Man the Hunted”
• Writing and record-keeping as important tools in the evolution of large-scale human cooperation
• “Brainchildren” — another way to conceptualize our devotion to cultural fitness
• Barash the gene accountant on that little economic driver called “reproduction”
• Does self organization of social networks foster cooperation in the face of cheating?
• New research suggests that chimpanzees understand that cooperation produces benefits
• Microbes may surf their way to successful cooperation
• An amazing indictment of the academic publishing industry (in which most of us participate)
• Should we emulate the cooperative and conservative habits of the sloth?
• An anecdote that illustrates the tremendous power of human network reciprocity
• Additional evidence that obesity may be due to environment, not just habits
• A tour of your diverse microbiome, and the things that might deplete that diversity
• More press for paper that de-bunks the zero determinant superiority
• My review of “Origins of Altruism and Cooperation” is published in QRB
• New evidence of whooping crane culture on the rebound
• Ethnocentric cooperation dominates humanitarian cooperation in the computer… so why does humanitarianism persist?
• Schadenfreude as an instinct born of being a social, hierarchical animal
• Cooperative child-rearing pays dividends for ruffed lemurs, irrespective of kinship
• National Geographic “The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion”
• Think the Milgram Experiments tell us something definitive about human nature? Think again!
• Zero determinant strategy is just another short-term adaptation
• Where to publish in ecology & evolution without funding for page charges
• Mammal monogamy still a mystery, but maybe more than a numbers game
• Embarking on a grand experiment in conceptual teaching
• Sketching as a way of seeing animal anatomy
• Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno
• Isabella Rossellini tackles motherhood without human pretense
• New theory explaining the prevalence of homosexuality focuses on epigenetics
• Ever wonder about the swimming pattern of sperm?
• The potential for human evolution has increased along with the population size of our species
• The benefits of a maintaining a relatively small in-group
• A spatial version of the Traveler’s Dilemma allows cooperation to persist
• Just in case you missed it the first ten times: E.O. Wilson likes group selection, Jerry Coyne does not
• Allen MacNeill predicts resolution of Ev-Coop debates
• Martin Nowak to lecture on the compatibility of god and the evolutionary process
• Understanding kin selection and reciprocity when strategies are culturally propagated
• Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
• “Earth Hour” seeks to re-focus our attention on all the earth provides
• Forward on Climate Rally seeks to shift the national dialogue on anthropogenic climate change
• Dog license dataset opens up huge potential for understanding the dog-human mutualism
• Brief NYT article on empathy in children
• Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
• Roberts Publishing releases an iPad version of their majors Evolution textbook
• Montreal art installation rewards cooperative play with musical novelty
• If your “free will” is questionable, feel free to exercise your “free won’t”
• Do our brains require endurance activity in order to function?
• Barash not so enlightening on the paradox of human homosexuality
• Multiple Intelligences theory gets some neuroscientific support
• Mishele Lesser’s Genoscapes explores the meaning of human genetics
• Freeman Dyson wins the contest, and then says the contest is stupid
• NPR provides a quick overview of the human drive to reciprocate
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• New evidence that economic cooperation existed between Vikings and Inuit
• National Geographic feature on penguin propulsion
• Does American faith in genetic determinism limit the achievement of our students?
• Further evidence that Hamilton was wrong about eusocial insects
• Making the formation of social networks more realistic also makes them more cooperative
• Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
• Slate article explores the big brain, big society connection
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• Megan Frederickson shares the wonder of ant cooperation with Toronto Library patrons
• Ready for eugenics 2.0?
• International Symposium honors the work of Lynn Margulis
• On becoming a psychopath
• Freeman Dyson calls the Prisoner’s Dilemma “an amusing toy”
• New PNAS special issue explores the developmental effects of early social environment
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• Can neuroeconomics help economics become a real science?
• Enforcing norms may be for personal gain, not to maintain social order (at least amongst Santa Barbara undergraduates)
• Think that the DNA transfer is only from parents to offspring? Think again!
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• Can proper education allow reputation to foster action on climate change?
• Lack of complete transparency presents an obstacle but not a block to cooperation
• Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, cannot triangulate punishment
• What’s ironic is that the creationists do not realize that we evolutionists might be trying to understand their success
• Agent-based modeling instead of game theory: I agree!
• Punishment, properly rewarded, can promote cooperation without corruption
• Does anthropogenic change make natives into invaders?
• Are the Sentinelese the last untouched hunter-gatherer culture?
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• Despite great press for Dyson, the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is still not the solution to human cooperation
• Rachel Carson still under attack for bringing her values to bear on her science
• Bacterial societies defy selfish gene predictions
• “School of Life” acknowledges the values in religion worth preserving
• Open and fluid, science even requires constant revision of logos
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• Infographic signs on the road to game theory understanding
• Can crocheting help save corals? Can we learn something about developmental genetics in the process?
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• Preview of the 2012 Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Climate change makes mountaineering more risky
• New evidence for gene-culture evolution in Native Americans
• Australopithecus sediba fossils reveal a more apelike diet
• Drift may be not be specific to genetic systems
• When any behavior can be modeled, real-world constraint is critical
• Experimental study of cooperation and population structure calls into question the importance of heterogeneity
• Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics hosts conference on the role of cooperation in major evolutionary transitions
• Mount Everest and the limits of play
• Additional theoretical study insists that population structure does promote cooperation
• I am finally diving into NetLogo!
• 7000 year old fossil human DNA discovered
• New fossil find pushes back the origin of bilaterally symmetrical multicellular organisms
• Matthew Zimmerman on how international relations views the evolution of groups
• High-throughput screening accelerates the rate at which evolved plant chemicals can be turned into medicine
• Changing rice from C3 to C4 in order to feed our growing population
• If your loners are truly loners they won’t punish, and cooperation thrives even in the presence of antisocial punishment
• Larry Arnhart on Singer, Bowles, and Gintis and Darwinian libertarianism
• A victory for collective action and national cooperation
• Australopithecus sediba was a C3 muncher (so say the teeth)
• Antibiotic overuse: a porcine tragedy of the commons
• Identifying the genes that gave dolphins their big brains
• Perhaps nestedness is just an artifact of ecological opportunity (and not stability)
• Condors, hunters, and the National Rifle Association
• Jerry Coyne refutes the E.O. Wilson NYT piece
• E.O. Wilson on the biological origins of sin and virtue
• A new salvo in the punishment wars: if everyone can punish, defectors triumph
• Call it “ethnocentrism” or the “green beard effect”, “tags” assist cooperation
• Sometimes our simulations have more to tell than we first see
• A final solution to the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma?
• On Being features David Sloan Wilson
• Daniel Dennett on Darwin and Turing’s “strange inversion of reasoning”
• Macroevolutionary change: do successful lineages have “evolvability” or “survivability”?
• Evolution may be too slow: British Columbia begins assisted migration of forests
• Diving bell spider fashions its own scuba tanks
• Wasps can recognize each other, by face
• National Geographic goes looking for heat-loving bacteria in a very cold place
• National Geographic feature on “Vanishing Languages”
• Shark species may be more cryptic than previously understood
• Peter Turchin on Steven Pinker’s “Grand Deception” hypotheses
• Steven Pinker makes it clear that he is not a “group selectionist”
• Are the population dynamics of Dupont’s lark dictated by multilevel selective pressures?
• Once again Jerry Coyne goes ad hominem to defend evolutionary orthodoxy
• Bird study suggests that multilevel selection theory is necessary to understand population dynamics
• Is sexual practice coevolving with our cultural technologies?
• Could differential symbiosis be a mechanism by which genetically-variable hosts speciate?
• Apparently you need to know something about rare granite erosion to understand the evolution of multicellularity
• Music evolves (culturally!) from noise to song under the influence of human selection
• Nice summary piece on the state of research into human nature and morality by Agustín Fuentes
• Turtles caught in the act provide new paleontological insights
• Tim Birkenhead on anthropomorphism and animal emotion
• David Barash illuminates the “EvoPolitics” of Darwin’s time
• Are there genetic markers for ethnicity?
• Ted Kaczynski as a scholar of resistance to technology
• Understanding the role of the Templeton Foundation in funding evolutionary biology research
• Preschoolers cooperatively rock chimps in puzzle tournament
• Prominent evolutionary biologists weigh in on whether humans can evolve into a ‘superorganism’
• Mutualistic fungus transfers nitrogen from parasitized insects to its plant host
• A competitive nominee in the “weirdest YouTube video about a theoretical biology paper” category
• Gerald Carter produces an informative video on cooperation in vampire bats
• Familiarity breeds… mutual aid (at least in some birds)
• Interesting reports from the Consilience Conference
• Jason Collins questions the utility-to-fitness conversion
• Do you need cooperation in your model to explain why there are more right-handed people?
• Once your subject becomes a continuing education class…
• Scientific American “Why We Help”
• July issue of Scientific American will feature a cover story on the evolution of cooperation
• Who is the bigger bioterrorist, man or nature?
• Self-castration sometimes turns out to be good for reproductive success
• Kandyan dwarf toad removes itself from the IUCN Red List
• Longer telomeres imparted by older fathers may forestall senescence
• Honey bees harbor a remarkably diverse community of mutualistic gut microbes
• Peacocks communicate via the (ultra)sounds they make with their feathers
• Is Alzheimer’s disease caused by prion proliferation?
• “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” exhibit at the American Museum on Natural History
• Our brains are too smart to be tricked: diet sodas just make your body crave more calories
• In case you were a skeptic: bears can count
• Freaked out grasshoppers just do not contribute to decomposition in the same manner as their more relaxed brethren
• Surprisingly, rugby can be used to understand honest signaling
• Digital organisms yield new insights into the effects of extinction on long-term phylogenetic patterns of evolution
• Is human genetic research being hampered by a failure to share data?
• New study on birds uses remote tracking to provide detailed behavioral data
• A comparison of behaviorally-based animal diseases reminds us of the kingdom in which we belong
• New comprehensive data synthesis favors a pluralistic explanation for Eurasian mammoth extinction
• Now if you could only keep your cytosine methylated you might live forever
• Bonobo sequence establishes that humans are equally but dissimilarly related to our chimpanzee relatives
• Elinor Ostrom, pioneering social scientist and scholar of cooperation, is dead at 78
• “EvoLudo” site provides tutorials on evolutionary games related to cooperation
• “Evolution and Games” site provides tutorials on cooperation theory
• Can “muppet theory” help explain behavioral heterogeneity in human social groups?
• Vampire bats: the ideal organism for studying cooperation?
• NY Times provides perspective on E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• PNAS paper explores the role of population structure in facilitating reciprocity
• Richard Dawkins on E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• David Sloan Wilson on Richard Dawkins on E.O. Wilson
• Don’t mistake having a better map for knowing where you are: new technology for sequencing fetal DNA will not lead to serious trait selection
• Understanding the effects of asymmetry and relatedness on social volunteerism
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project launches with its first release of graphic packages
• There are plenty of organs out there: more altruism would end the social dilemma of who gets available organs
• Economic Whales and their Parasites
• More flatfish transitional fossils found
• Human limits extended one step further as wingsuit diver lands without a parachute
• Larry Arnhart reviews E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• David Sloan Wilson differentiates “Evolutionary Religious Studies” from “The New Atheism”
• Peter Turchin on the “Dark Side of Cultural Evolution”
• Social Evolution Forum takes on role of social networking in human cooperation
• {Canis lupus familiaris + Homo sapiens} versus Homo neanderthalenthis?
• Is the origin of all life the gyre?
• S.E. Gould takes on sloppy use of the selfish gene metaphor
• Alife XIII conference explores the simulation of artificial life
• Why don’t other animals make better use of punishment?
• Conservation Biology that acknowledges that we can never go back
• Can cod come back?
• I knew that dog was watching me: Jennifer Verdolin confirms my worst fears
• If you don’t think that culture can make us do maladaptive things, check out “trepanning”
• Richard Sennett’s “Together” explores the history of cooperative rituals
• National Academies Press releases proceedings for “Cooperation and Conflict” colloquium
• “Open Yale” course provides the fundamentals of Game Theory for free
• John Horgan reviews Robert Trivers’ “The Folly of Fools”
• James K. Galbraith makes the connection between debt policy and social stability
• BBC covers the up side of the North Pacific plastic “garbage patch”
• Short interview with Mark Pagel in The Guardian
• Olivia Judson reviews Mark Pagel’s “Wired for Culture”
• Are dolphins on their way to domesticating humans?
• I am not the only one who likes to narrowly interpret creative works through my scientific lens
• NPR drops dumb Bell Curve segment
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: Ultimatum Game “conceptual” images
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First “sequence” images
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: New “conceptual” images
• What kind of in-group does Facebook represent?
• Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild”
• Is the European Union going rogue or playing altruist on airline emissions?
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First “examples” matrices
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First images
• Howard Rheingold TED talk urges a global movement to study cooperation
• Science in Art & Design: Justin Taylor’s “The Gospel of Anarchy”
• Costly signalling not so costly in the presence of comrades
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Eco-mysticism in the Ecology Classroom, Discontinuity in Evolutionary Theory
• Naturalistic Fallacy: 1, Sam Harris: 0
• Patterns in mussel beds may reflect interaction between individual behavior and emergent environmental patterns
• How the right wing co-opts research into the evolution of cooperation
• Rand and Nowak paper on antisocial punishment in public goods games
• Is humanity’s most dangerous technology debt?
• Martin Nowak lecture on The Evolution of Cooperation at MIT
• What can Dean Potter teach us about evolution?
• If Only Game Designers Were Scientists
• Understanding Rupert Murdoch from an Evolutionary Perspective
• Epigenetics on Leonard Lopate
• Aquaculture on Leonard Lopate
• Mexican Culture and Collective Action
• Economics and Human Satisfaction
• Easy-IPD version 1.0 released!
• “DNA” by James D. Watson
• Barash and Lipton on Bin Laden (and Us)
• NY Times way behind the times on Nature versus Nurture
• Being Clean Might Make You Allergic
• Sex and Slime on Fresh Air
• “A Paradise Built in Hell” by Rebecca Solnit
• Contemporary Human Cooperation With Non-Kin Probably No Mistake
• Cultural Evolution in a Hybrid Society
• Make Every Day Darwin Day, Minus the Darwin
• Computer-Based Tools for Teaching about Robert Axelrod’s Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments
• The beginning of sex as we know it
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• In the Light of Evolution V: Cooperation (January 7th)
• In the Light of Evolution V: Cooperation (An Abbreviated and Incomplete Social Network Analysis of the Speakers)
• E.O. Wilson’s “The Four Great Books of Darwin”
• Is the “hopelessly incomplete” fossil record a little better than we give it credit for?
• Official video of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010
• Delayed Development and Human Evolution
• Greg Graffin on The Takeaway
• Scientific American “Controlling the Brain with Light”
• The Role of Technology in Human Evolution
• National Geographic’s “Science of Dogs”
• Robert Trivers and colleagues on Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson’s “The evolution of eusociality”
• Firefighting and the Tragedy of the Commons
• Asian Carp on NPR
• The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution
• Sourcing sources of selection
• Do you still think God is good?
• Teaching evolution and game theory, simultaneously
• NPR is all up in evolution
• Evolution 2010 (Overall Impressions)
• Evolution 2010 Day 5 (June 29th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 4 (June 28th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 3 (June 27th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 2 (June 26th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 1 (June 25th)
• Darwin’s Cathedral versus The God Delusion
• The Quest for the Perfect Hive
• Consilience
• Understanding biome-level response to climate change
• National Geographic “Fatal Attraction”
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday): Afternoon sessions
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – Mutualistic Networks Symposium
• ESA 2009 Meeting Day #2 (Monday)
• Patternicity and that jerk on the cell phone
• Human Adaptation and Happiness
• Common Ground Symposium at Columbia University
• An Introduction

MSCI-261, The Evolution of Play (3)

MSCI-270, Ecology (18)

• STEAMplant project brings local primary school kids to Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden
• How will the COVID-19 crisis affect action on climate change?
• Core of Me short video
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2019)
• Eco-Performance Lab during Pratt’s 2019 Green Week the first step of “To the Core of Me”
• My newest STEAMplant collaboration is “To the Core of Me: A Hike Play”
• My interview with Ardis DeFreece has been published in SciArt Magazine
• YES, microplastics end up in our guts. Now the question is from where? And to what effect?
• How renewable power sources grow more trees
• Australia’s a hot spot for climate change politics, climate change science, and climate change suffering
• Humans arrive, other mammals shrink
• Don’t blame people for being obese (blame their neighborhood)
• Mom leaves, offspring get buff and work together
• Wildfires driven more by lowered precipitation than elevated temperatures or reduced snowpack
• Are corals riding ocean currents to exert climate change dominance over macroalgae?
• We aren’t the only gardeners on Madgascar
• Meta-analysis suggests that pesticides impair bee memory and learning
• No-till has some big no-catastrophic-climate-change potential
• What might we discover in the ocean twilight zone?
• Parasites better watch out for parasites!
• Model suggests that warming climate will catalyze greater insect-pest crop losses
• Escape is a big risk in aquaculture
• Is it possible that Trump’s science-adviser is a stealth climate-change accepter?
• Is sexualization of women driven by the structure of our economy?
• Both primates have their own uses for the same land
• Can a realistically-parameterized model tell us why our brains are so big?
• Professor Jensen’s Guide to Urban Cycling
• PBS’ Deep Look on mole crabs
• PBS’ Deep Look on Firefly communication and deception
• I will present my EnviroAtlas class activities at NCSE 2018
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2017)
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Deep Look on nutrient transport by salmon
• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• BLUE WEEK 2017 comes to Pratt Institute
• Urban Transect Walks: helping your students see the overlap between ecological and social patterns
• Hey, ho, Portland Oregon ESA 2017, let’s go!
• My review of new edited Trophic Ecology book out in the Quarterly Review of Biology
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2017)
• Pratt News features short piece on Dr. Roland Kays’s campus visit
• Republicans release climate change plan based on “Respiration Reduction”
• Green Week 2017 opens at Pratt Institute
• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• Like boats & science?… this might be the artist’s residency for you!
• Science and art in dialogue: Pratt Manhattan Gallery hosts Dr. Rachael Winfree
• Eco 101: Exponential Growth & Decay
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Hedgehogs, Raccoons, and Urbanite Biophilia
• Skeptoid podcast on Colony Collapse Disorder
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2016)
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• 2016 Sustainability Summit live on Pratt’s Video Site
• Concerned about NYC’s air quality? Here’s a quick page to check…
• Want to know where NYC’s water supply stands? There’s a DEP page for that!
• My ecological footprint for 2016-2017
• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• Sustainability Summit at Pratt Institute featuring Josh Fox
• Biophotovoltaics: a promising design innovation, or a great example of lack of quantitative design?
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2016)
• Where’s the world’s biggest solar-electric power station going to be located?
• It’s good to remember how fast things change, culturally & biologically
• My ecological footprint for 2015-2016
• Alternative music legend Morrissey agrees to adopt 2 million feral cats in win-win for felines, Australian native fauna
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• Students succeed in convincing the Pratt Board of Trustees to divest from fossil fuels
• Like to forage for mushrooms? Beware the Amanita!
• I am honored to be visiting the Green Meadow Waldorf School as part of their week-long Sustainability workshop
• “This is the Nature of Cities” podcast on urban bees and civic ecology
• “Science: A Candle in the Dark” podcast on Urban Ecology
• “In Defense of Plants” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the return of five-lined skinks
• Announcing “Eco 101”, a series of blog posts on the basics of ecology
• Why are architects required to take a course focused on ecology and environmental science?
• Eco 101: Carrying Capacity
• An eye is not an eye is not an eye
• Food is personal, sometimes ethical, but rarely political
• Is New York City a “sustainable” metropolis?
• Clever study shows how cooperative bacteria sanction — and therefore exclude — cheaters
• Can understanding cooperation lead to higher-yield crops?
• Lev Ginzburg Fest: celebration of a “retirement”
• It was an honor to talk to St. Francis College!
• My first “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators” talk: next Friday at St. Francis College
• Crucial climate talks in Paris take place in a socially repressive environment
• Are technological optimists too optimistic about technological sustainability?
• Jonathan Haidt on the business advantage of being ethical
• Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
• China shifts a failed cultural policy designed to stabilize population
• Major masts made by multiplicative modification
• Does the rapid spread of a culture of over-exploitation intensify our impact on wild food sources?
• Are parasites really ecologically necessary?
• Shark attacks are down, but you still have to make good decisions out there on the ocean
• While we vacuum the seas, we may as well clean them of debris…
• Cargo ships a major source of NOx emissions
• Why the “just burn it all” approach to ending fossil fuel dependence does not work
• Mist net photographs as art?
• Charismatic megafauna offer protection to their less appealing heterospecifics
• Urbanization is not urbanization: density, not size, drives sustainability
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• Without sustainability in our diets, we won’t be sustainable
• ECOmotion Studios on Huffaker’s crazy experiments to make prey and predators coexist
• ECOmotion Studios on Simberloff & Wilson’s island biogeography experiments
• ECOmotion Studios on Hairston Smith Slobodkin and why the earth is green
• EcoMotion studios celebrates Robert Paine’s Pisaster experiments
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on synanthropes and urban island castaways
• Should we compromise with nations that hunt whales?
• Are big corporate polluters trying to “artwash” their image?
• Formation of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution has the potential to catalyze research into how culture evolves
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• Can good design make highways less of a problem?
• Rule number one of cooperative bacterial warfare? Be in the majority.
• WmD Episode #00003 has been released
• Carrying capacity — but not growth rate — varies with habitat quality (at least for moose)
• Go mutualistic or go home?
• WmD Episode #00002 has been released
• So much for the big-brained city bird theory?
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on big animals in big cities
• Rivers, Lakes, Seas, and Environmental Justice
• Urban tree power
• My new favorite concept mapping activity: depicting whole-system ecological flows
• Evolution beyond adaptation: a critical step for evolutionary theory
• Sadly, the Population Bombers (mostly) still don’t get it
• Court Ruling in the Netherlands may point the way to cracking the climate compliance conundrum
• Zoonosis, Ebola, and the Elusive Reservoir Host
• Is the threat of regulation enough to incentivize cooperation from nitrogen polluters?
• In the end, climate compromise comes down to writing and editing
• Grass on a Pedestal
• The costly nature of wind pollination
• New article in Science provides a comprehensive overview and update on Yellowstone National Park
• My ecological footprint for 2014-2015
• On the verge of 400 ppm Carbon Dioxide: a symbolic threshold
• PCB Bioaccumulation and Polar Bear Penises
• The Big Questions in Ecology and Evolution
• My review of the “Encyclopedia of Theoretical Ecology” published in QRB
• Water, Alfalfa, China, and a modern Tragedy of the Commons
• Evolution 2014: Day 2
• Evolution 2014: Day 1
• Evolution 2014: Could the right symbionts provide protection from chytrid infection to amphibians?
• Evolution 2014: Are island mutualist communities more likely to be nested because they are inherently more unstable?
• Evolution 2014: Is thyme a facultative mutualist with leguminous plants?
• Evolution 2014: Lemurs display huge diet diversity, and their gut microbes track this diversity
• Evolution 2014: Aphids protect themselves from parasitoids by harboring a bacteria whose viral parasite is toxic
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Evolution 2014: Evolution of cooperation in the high school classroom? You bet!
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• John Oliver holds first “balanced” climate debate on television
• Our review paper on Late Pleistocene Extinction Modeling published in QRB!
• Is “nest parasitism” really “nest mutualism”?
• There’s No Such Thing as Qualitative Sustainability
• New glacial maximum on Mount ARC provides definitive evidence that Pratt’s sustainability efforts are working
• I receive funding to initiate the WmD Project
• Interesting numbers on the sustainability (or lack thereof) of the aviation industry
• If sloths endure costs to maintain closed-loop agricultural systems, why can’t we?
• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• Was Teilhard de Chardin the real inventor of an evolutionary approach to culture?
• Understanding the cascading effect of carnivore loss… before we lose all the carnivores
• Why socially-progressive scientists should not make bets…
• Cod gone on Cape Cod
• Concentrated factory farming of livestock massively alters the phosphorus cycle
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• CNN tackles climate change by explaining public goods games!
• Now legal, Northern California’s pot farms join the rest of agriculture in impacting water supply
• Nice infographic on global and domestic food waste
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• Would a different term make us better appreciate ecosystem services?
• Caterpillars weaponize nicotine
• Microbes may surf their way to successful cooperation
• An amazing indictment of the academic publishing industry (in which most of us participate)
• Should we emulate the cooperative and conservative habits of the sloth?
• Additional evidence that obesity may be due to environment, not just habits
• A tour of your diverse microbiome, and the things that might deplete that diversity
• With all we know, we still know too little to reliably re-engineer ecosystems
• New evidence of whooping crane culture on the rebound
• Schadenfreude as an instinct born of being a social, hierarchical animal
• Cooperative child-rearing pays dividends for ruffed lemurs, irrespective of kinship
• National Geographic “The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion”
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Where to publish in ecology & evolution without funding for page charges
• Mammal monogamy still a mystery, but maybe more than a numbers game
• Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno
• Great NPR piece on how simple it would be for us to reduce carbon emissions
• Working on a VUE concept map of the fieldTest simulation
• NPR piece suggests that economics are pushing us towards nutrient recycling
• My review of Railsback and Grimm’s “Agent-based and individual-based modeling” textbook published in Ecology
• “Earth Hour” seeks to re-focus our attention on all the earth provides
• Forward on Climate Rally seeks to shift the national dialogue on anthropogenic climate change
• Quantifying the climate value of that 40-acre woodlot
• Dog license dataset opens up huge potential for understanding the dog-human mutualism
• Production on marginal lands can meet only 25% of our biofuel mandates
• Charlotte Douglas International Airport employs worms to close the loop on airport waste
• Fracking study retracted after the discovery of a massive conflict of interest
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• National Geographic feature on penguin propulsion
• Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• Megan Frederickson shares the wonder of ant cooperation with Toronto Library patrons
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• Michael Ruse on James Lovelock’s Gaia of 2012
• Rogue iron fertilization? Things have gotten weird!
• Rob Nixon on Rachel Carson’s prescience
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• Barry Commoner, pioneering scientist and environmentalist, is dead at 95
• Some conservatives actually see the public health and economic dilemmas posed by greenhouse gas emissions
• Can proper education allow reputation to foster action on climate change?
• Want a good gauge of how much humans pollute waterways? Just measure for caffeine!
• The humble Mistletoe turns out to be a probable keystone species
• Climate and Clean Air Coalition unites air pollution concerns
• Reductions in fertilizer use are now worth carbon credits
• Does anthropogenic change make natives into invaders?
• Are the Sentinelese the last untouched hunter-gatherer culture?
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• Rachel Carson still under attack for bringing her values to bear on her science
• Rebranding global warming as a health threat
• Bacterial societies defy selfish gene predictions
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• “Adaptive” approach to climate change puts faith in resilience thinking
• My review of “How Species Interact” published in Ecological Modelling
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• ESA 2012 Workshop #8, Getting off the Ground with Individual-Based Modeling: A Primer for Instructors and Researchers
• The many ecotones of the Columbia Gorge
• Preview of the 2012 Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Mark Bittman on the ecological imperative of eating less meat
• Climate change makes mountaineering more risky
• Acid rain policy changes yield slow but real ecological results
• High-throughput screening accelerates the rate at which evolved plant chemicals can be turned into medicine
• Fences exclude invasive predators, give aid to threatened Hawaiian birds
• Macroecologists weigh in on how well sustainability science considers ecological limits
• High tech ad hoc fixes face off against good old-fashioned prevention in the Baltic Sea
• The ecological impacts of the BP-Deepwater Horizon oil spill quantified
• Perhaps nestedness is just an artifact of ecological opportunity (and not stability)
• Condors, hunters, and the National Rifle Association
• Evolution may be too slow: British Columbia begins assisted migration of forests
• Extensive long-term studies document the effect of biodiversity in ecosystem productivity
• National Geographic goes looking for heat-loving bacteria in a very cold place
• National Geographic’s “If They Could Only Talk” considers Easter Island’s many mysteries
• Are the population dynamics of Dupont’s lark dictated by multilevel selective pressures?
• New study published in Ecology Letters quantifies the effects of intensive agriculture on large-scale biodiversity
• Bird study suggests that multilevel selection theory is necessary to understand population dynamics
• Most people (at least in Spain) recognize the value of ecosystem services, but their valuation varies
• Could differential symbiosis be a mechanism by which genetically-variable hosts speciate?
• Would you like a few red-listed species with that shrimp cocktail sir?
• Mutualistic fungus transfers nitrogen from parasitized insects to its plant host
• North Carolina legislators enact strict law limiting the rate of natural change
• Do you need cooperation in your model to explain why there are more right-handed people?
• Scientific American “Why We Help”
• Who is the bigger bioterrorist, man or nature?
• There is no doubt that there are conservation trade-offs associated with the proliferation of wind power
• Brian Czech warns ecologists against drinking the “sustainable growth Koolaid”
• Honey bees harbor a remarkably diverse community of mutualistic gut microbes
• Lyme disease extensification may have more to do with foxes than deer
• “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” exhibit at the American Museum on Natural History
• Freaked out grasshoppers just do not contribute to decomposition in the same manner as their more relaxed brethren
• Aquatic food chains have gotten longer and less diverse over evolutionary time
• Digital organisms yield new insights into the effects of extinction on long-term phylogenetic patterns of evolution
• Mesocosm experiment considers the effects of human modification of community structure
• Big felines have lots of commensal fans
• The Australian Government blocks coal mine to protect the Great Barrier Reef
• Does climate change have the potential to reduce the stabilizing effects of biodiversity?
• Understanding the effects of asymmetry and relatedness on social volunteerism
• Economic Whales and their Parasites
• Will invasive truffles become the bane of European epicures?
• Are the most lucrative components of the financial sector parasites on the larger economy?
• How fast do anthropogenic impacts get amplified up the food chain? Ask a bluefin!
• Paulinella chromatophora’s photosynthetic engine blurs the line between endosymbiont and organelle
• An argument for better Frankensteins (and thus more prudent use of technology)
• Can cod come back?
• Molly H. Adams earns top honors from the Critical and Visual Studies program
• James K. Galbraith makes the connection between debt policy and social stability
• BBC covers the up side of the North Pacific plastic “garbage patch”
• Painting called “Endosymbiosis” honors the legacy of Lynn Margulis
• 2012 Sustainability Crash Course at Pratt Institute
• Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild”
• Steven Railsback and Volker Grimm offer new introduction to the process of agent- and individual-based modeling
• Is the European Union going rogue or playing altruist on airline emissions?
• Joel E. Cohen on the 7 billion human mark
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• Howard Rheingold TED talk urges a global movement to study cooperation
• There’s Dirt Under Them Thar Sidewalks
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Patterns in mussel beds may reflect interaction between individual behavior and emergent environmental patterns
• Online tools for teaching the basics of population growth
• Hurricane Irene evacuation naysayers point out some fundamental human problems with understanding risk
• If Only Game Designers Were Scientists
• Aquaculture on Leonard Lopate
• Sex and Slime on Fresh Air
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• Saving Puffins, One Clip at a Time
• Mirsky on Poop in Space
• Using Ecological Footprints to Teach Sustainability
• Are Eco-labels an Effective Tool for Conservation?
• Official video of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010
• National Geographic’s “Science of Dogs”
• 2010 Convention on Biological Diversity and Ecosystem Services (Sorta)
• Asian Carp on NPR
• National Geographic “Wolf Wars”
• The Cove
• Steven Chillrud Visit to Pratt Institute
• Vegans and the Quest for Sanity
• ESA 2010 (Overall Impressions)
• ESA 2010 Day 6 (August 6th)
• ESA 2010 Day 5 (August 5th)
• ESA 2010 Day 4 (August 4th)
• ESA 2010 Day 3 (August 3rd)
• ESA 2010 Day 2 (August 2nd)
• ESA 2010 Day 1 (August 1st)
• Understanding biome-level response to climate change
• National Geographic “Fatal Attraction”
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – “Big Models” Special Session
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday): Afternoon sessions
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – Mutualistic Networks Symposium
• ESA 2009 Meeting Day #2 (Monday)
• ESA 2009 Day #1 (Sunday)
• Changing and not changing the way we use our agricultural land
• Human Adaptation and Happiness
• An Introduction

MSCI-271, Ecology for Architects (20)

• What in Darwin’s name was I thinking? (#001)
• An analysis of my course evaluations for Spring 2016
• Biophotovoltaics: a promising design innovation, or a great example of lack of quantitative design?
• Where’s the world’s biggest solar-electric power station going to be located?
• What can be made by mimicking biological “assemblies”?
• My ecological footprint for 2015-2016
• Why are architects required to take a course focused on ecology and environmental science?
• Eco 101: Carrying Capacity
• End: Sabbatical; Resume: Teaching
• Is New York City a “sustainable” metropolis?
• Are technological optimists too optimistic about technological sustainability?
• Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
• Why the “just burn it all” approach to ending fossil fuel dependence does not work
• Charismatic megafauna offer protection to their less appealing heterospecifics
• Urbanization is not urbanization: density, not size, drives sustainability
• An analysis of my course evaluations for Spring 2015
• My new favorite concept mapping activity: depicting whole-system ecological flows
• New article in Science provides a comprehensive overview and update on Yellowstone National Park
• My ecological footprint for 2014-2015
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change

MSCI-362, The Evolution of Sex (7)

MSCI-363, Biological Origins of Sound & Music (2)

MSCI-463, The Evolution of Cooperation (8)

MSWI-260C, Evolution (2)

• STEAMplant project brings local primary school kids to Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden
• Alexandra Walling illuminates the mutual aid between evolutionary biologists and Jeffrey Epstein
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2019)
• SSE tells HHS to acknowledge sex and gender diversity
• A cool (new-ish) IPD game theory simulator!
• When it comes to considering sex and gender, don’t forget sex determination
• Break not the ungulate culture of migration
• Humans arrive, other mammals shrink
• Scientific American drops special issue on “Science of Being Human”
• Don’t blame people for being obese (blame their neighborhood)
• Mom: “Eat my sh*t and then help your younger siblings”
• Mom leaves, offspring get buff and work together
• We aren’t the only gardeners on Madgascar
• All it takes to get a little specialized is a small increase in group size…
• Different hominin species not so species-like it seems
• Parasites better watch out for parasites!
• Is sexualization of women driven by the structure of our economy?
• Can a realistically-parameterized model tell us why our brains are so big?
• Professor Jensen’s Guide to Urban Cycling
• Alan Rabinowitz, 1953-2018
• My entry on the evolution of play will be added to the massive Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science
• PBS’ Deep Look on mole crabs
• PBS’ Deep Look on Firefly communication and deception
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2017)
• Why Artists & Designers need Scientists: Exhibit A
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Fantastic piece on nature/nurture by Patrick F. Clarkin in TVOL
• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• Moral Sense III approaches, June 2nd at St. Francis College
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2017)
• Pratt News features short piece on Dr. Roland Kays’s campus visit
• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• I am honored to be part of Moral Sense III
• Support the mighty Bombardier Beetle’s quest to have its genome sequenced!
• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Hedgehogs, Raccoons, and Urbanite Biophilia
• NPR features Christopher Boehm on the love-hate relationship we have people in power
• Another great Skeptoid episode, this one on race
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2016)
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• Maybe human impacts aren’t so dramatic (when experienced from the geologic time scale)
• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• An inspiring summit, but big challenges at home and afar…
• Arming the Donkeys on kids, parenting, and Burning Man
• My article on adolescence featured in the This View of Life culture series
• Pratt students make the potential trip to Mars better designed
• A potentially interesting Evolution of Play documentary
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2016)
• You can check out my first Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk (at St. Francis College) on YouTube
• Soon-to-be released Evolution and Human Culture book to feature my testimonial
• It’s good to remember how fast things change, culturally & biologically
• What can be made by mimicking biological “assemblies”?
• FDA investigators raid American Society of Human Genetics offices in Carl Zimmer cloning case
• Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson liberated after month-long kidnapping ordeal
• America Society of Primatologists condemns H. A. and Margret Rey, calls for Curious George boycott
• Like to forage for mushrooms? Beware the Amanita!
• Great conversation at my Columbia University Population Biology Seminar talk
• My next Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk: Columbia University on March 7th, 2016
• I visit Pratt’s Poetics Lab focused on play
• Dan Ariely’s “Arming the Donkeys” podcast
• What do we know about Cultural Transmission?
• Emerging Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution releases roadmap document
• An eye is not an eye is not an eye
• Food is personal, sometimes ethical, but rarely political
• How do we know when people are actually happy?
• Understanding [culture + multilevel selection] = potential for Sustainability
• Is there a trade-off between reproduction and creativity?
• Would a “labor economy” lead to different outcomes than the “capital economy”?
• Clever study shows how cooperative bacteria sanction — and therefore exclude — cheaters
• Can understanding cooperation lead to higher-yield crops?
• How the built environment influences our ability to sustain personal and environmental commitments
• Personalized DNA tests likely to provide further evidence of human inter-connectedness
• My personal experience that creationists gravitate to anything with even the faintest scent of scientific uncertainty (and what to do about it)
• Lev Ginzburg Fest: celebration of a “retirement”
• It was an honor to talk to St. Francis College!
• My first “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators” talk: next Friday at St. Francis College
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• How much impact can a set of free game theory infographics have?
• Crucial climate talks in Paris take place in a socially repressive environment
• To be an effective critical theorist of science, it helps to understand science
• Primates — but not their rodent relatives — can infer the effects of other individuals on resource availability
• Jeremy Yoder on contemporary selection for increased human height
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• Maybe infants don’t really care who helps and who hinders after all…
• The problem with same sex attraction “for the good of the species”
• Fascinating and clever study of how personal contact norms vary by relationship
• Jonathan Haidt on the business advantage of being ethical
• That beard and deep voice may be to put him in his place, not attract her
• What’s the evolved function of curiosity?
• Review of William B. Provine’s “The ‘Random Genetic Drift’ Fallacy”
• Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
• Polygyny: the culture we dislike might not be the culture that is evolutionarily disfavored
• China shifts a failed cultural policy designed to stabilize population
• Major masts made by multiplicative modification
• Group phenotypic composition: implications for individuals and their groups
• Does the rapid spread of a culture of over-exploitation intensify our impact on wild food sources?
• Are parasites really ecologically necessary?
• The prickly (and largely unknown) sex life of bats
• David Sloan Wilson on how Jeff Bezos don’t know squat about chickens (or evolution!)
• Does Bayesian bias aid us in making adaptive distorted self-assessments?
• Malcolm Gladwell on the social contagion of mass shootings
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• Is technological evolution “de-agglomerating” cultural innovation?
• EcoMotion studios celebrates Robert Paine’s Pisaster experiments
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on synanthropes and urban island castaways
• Like-with-like assortment plus exponential fitness increases cooperation, even under weak selection
• Should we compromise with nations that hunt whales?
• My testimonial for Gregory Tague’s “Evolution and Human Culture”
• The often-large difference between “breeding” and “parenting”
• Anne-Marie Slaughter on the tradeoff between work and caregiving
• New report on drug resistance highlights the tragedy of our antibiotics commons
• Open Tree of Life allows experts and novices alike to explore “the” phylogeny
• Do creative people have “messy minds”?
• Does the ability to accumulate wealth make us value the future more?
• Formation of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution has the potential to catalyze research into how culture evolves
• When it comes to sex, we are consumately proximate
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• Evolution 2016 meeting will feature evolution-themed art exhibit
• A chance to learn how an understanding of empathy can inform design
• Asymmetrical interaction best explained by superrational rather than rational strategy
• Our culture is special, but not especially uncommon
• Have we outgrown the scale of cooperation supported by the Big Gods of Big Religion?
• The most fundamental way in which culture pushes against biology
• Rule number one of cooperative bacterial warfare? Be in the majority.
• WmD Episode #00003 has been released
• Music, the cortisone balm?
• Should altruism have an effect on your final exam score?
• Explaining the evolutionary explanation for handedness
• WmD Episode #00002 has been released
• So much for the big-brained city bird theory?
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on big animals in big cities
• Urban tree power
• Evolution beyond adaptation: a critical step for evolutionary theory
• Zoonosis, Ebola, and the Elusive Reservoir Host
• WmD Episode #00001 has been released!
• Can we resolve the ‘group selection debate’ by focusing on human cooperation?
• Sabbatical, Sweet Sabbatical
• Is the threat of regulation enough to incentivize cooperation from nitrogen polluters?
• In the end, climate compromise comes down to writing and editing
• The costly nature of wind pollination
• How stupid professorial attitudes towards Wikipedia are making students less savvy
• PCB Bioaccumulation and Polar Bear Penises
• The Big Questions in Ecology and Evolution
• E&E in A&D: Genetic profiling as art?
• E&E in A&D: The Armstrong Lie
• Our paper on a super-rational solution to the tragedy of the commons published in Scientific Reports
• The forces of cultural evolution push hard on political humor
• Scientific American down on memorization
• Review of What We Made by Tom Finkelpearl
• Water, Alfalfa, China, and a modern Tragedy of the Commons
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• Ben Knight’s “Phyletic gradualism / Punctuated equilibrium”
• A nice synopsis of some reasons for laughter
• Do humans form genetically similar social groups independent of kinship?
• Do cancer cells play cooperate in the Prisoner’s Dilemma?
• My Evolution 2014 talk is on YouTube
• Evolution 2014: Day 2
• Evolution 2014: Day 1
• Evolution 2014: Could the right symbionts provide protection from chytrid infection to amphibians?
• Evolution 2014: Are island mutualist communities more likely to be nested because they are inherently more unstable?
• Evolution 2014: Lemurs display huge diet diversity, and their gut microbes track this diversity
• Evolution 2014: Aphids protect themselves from parasitoids by harboring a bacteria whose viral parasite is toxic
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Evolution 2014: Evolution of cooperation in the high school classroom? You bet!
• Evolution 2014: Cooperative data collection is more meaningful than individual data collection
• Evolution 2014: Students can watch fly populations evolve in a matter of weeks
• Evolution 2014: Preview
• Hawaiian crickets converge on the same solution to eavesdropping parasites
• Cath Dennis publishes non-computerized classroom adaptation of Axelrod’s iPD Tournament
• Our review paper on Late Pleistocene Extinction Modeling published in QRB!
• Apparently I should stop holding my breath for the Google Translate “dolphin” module
• Is “nest parasitism” really “nest mutualism”?
• 0.5% to 3%: Do we now have a better sense of what makes people smart?
• David Haig suggests that babies cry at night to prevent siblings
• There’s No Such Thing as Qualitative Sustainability
• Donald Trump saves CitiBike, proving that selfishness and cooperation are no longer opposed
• Cognitive Ethology and Cat Companionship
• I receive funding to initiate the WmD Project
• If sloths endure costs to maintain closed-loop agricultural systems, why can’t we?
• String Theory: should we care?
• Okay, I admit it: I am a bit of a Neanderthal
• Model evidence that third party punishment only makes sense in tight-knit groups
• How understanding social evolution might help treat cancer
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• Was Teilhard de Chardin the real inventor of an evolutionary approach to culture?
• Cod gone on Cape Cod
• New edited volume joins the growing collection of literature dedicated to how cooperation evolves
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• In bird reproduction, parasitism and cooperation coevolve
• Curiosity and culturomics
• CNN tackles climate change by explaining public goods games!
• Money Talking about Janet Yellen and multilevel selection
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• Can you replicate the collective adaptive value of religion without god?
• Caterpillars weaponize nicotine
• Taking risks for the data
• New fossil finds provide unique insight into the variation found in “Man the Hunted”
• Writing and record-keeping as important tools in the evolution of large-scale human cooperation
• “Brainchildren” — another way to conceptualize our devotion to cultural fitness
• Barash the gene accountant on that little economic driver called “reproduction”
• Does self organization of social networks foster cooperation in the face of cheating?
• New research suggests that chimpanzees understand that cooperation produces benefits
• Microbes may surf their way to successful cooperation
• An amazing indictment of the academic publishing industry (in which most of us participate)
• Should we emulate the cooperative and conservative habits of the sloth?
• An anecdote that illustrates the tremendous power of human network reciprocity
• Additional evidence that obesity may be due to environment, not just habits
• A tour of your diverse microbiome, and the things that might deplete that diversity
• More press for paper that de-bunks the zero determinant superiority
• My review of “Origins of Altruism and Cooperation” is published in QRB
• New evidence of whooping crane culture on the rebound
• Ethnocentric cooperation dominates humanitarian cooperation in the computer… so why does humanitarianism persist?
• Schadenfreude as an instinct born of being a social, hierarchical animal
• Cooperative child-rearing pays dividends for ruffed lemurs, irrespective of kinship
• National Geographic “The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion”
• Think the Milgram Experiments tell us something definitive about human nature? Think again!
• Zero determinant strategy is just another short-term adaptation
• Where to publish in ecology & evolution without funding for page charges
• Mammal monogamy still a mystery, but maybe more than a numbers game
• Embarking on a grand experiment in conceptual teaching
• Sketching as a way of seeing animal anatomy
• Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno
• Isabella Rossellini tackles motherhood without human pretense
• New theory explaining the prevalence of homosexuality focuses on epigenetics
• Ever wonder about the swimming pattern of sperm?
• The potential for human evolution has increased along with the population size of our species
• The benefits of a maintaining a relatively small in-group
• A spatial version of the Traveler’s Dilemma allows cooperation to persist
• Just in case you missed it the first ten times: E.O. Wilson likes group selection, Jerry Coyne does not
• Allen MacNeill predicts resolution of Ev-Coop debates
• Martin Nowak to lecture on the compatibility of god and the evolutionary process
• Understanding kin selection and reciprocity when strategies are culturally propagated
• Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
• “Earth Hour” seeks to re-focus our attention on all the earth provides
• Forward on Climate Rally seeks to shift the national dialogue on anthropogenic climate change
• Dog license dataset opens up huge potential for understanding the dog-human mutualism
• Brief NYT article on empathy in children
• Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
• Roberts Publishing releases an iPad version of their majors Evolution textbook
• Montreal art installation rewards cooperative play with musical novelty
• If your “free will” is questionable, feel free to exercise your “free won’t”
• Do our brains require endurance activity in order to function?
• Barash not so enlightening on the paradox of human homosexuality
• Multiple Intelligences theory gets some neuroscientific support
• Mishele Lesser’s Genoscapes explores the meaning of human genetics
• Freeman Dyson wins the contest, and then says the contest is stupid
• NPR provides a quick overview of the human drive to reciprocate
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• New evidence that economic cooperation existed between Vikings and Inuit
• National Geographic feature on penguin propulsion
• Does American faith in genetic determinism limit the achievement of our students?
• Further evidence that Hamilton was wrong about eusocial insects
• Making the formation of social networks more realistic also makes them more cooperative
• Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
• Slate article explores the big brain, big society connection
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• Megan Frederickson shares the wonder of ant cooperation with Toronto Library patrons
• Ready for eugenics 2.0?
• International Symposium honors the work of Lynn Margulis
• On becoming a psychopath
• Freeman Dyson calls the Prisoner’s Dilemma “an amusing toy”
• New PNAS special issue explores the developmental effects of early social environment
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• Can neuroeconomics help economics become a real science?
• Enforcing norms may be for personal gain, not to maintain social order (at least amongst Santa Barbara undergraduates)
• Think that the DNA transfer is only from parents to offspring? Think again!
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• Can proper education allow reputation to foster action on climate change?
• Lack of complete transparency presents an obstacle but not a block to cooperation
• Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, cannot triangulate punishment
• What’s ironic is that the creationists do not realize that we evolutionists might be trying to understand their success
• Agent-based modeling instead of game theory: I agree!
• Punishment, properly rewarded, can promote cooperation without corruption
• Does anthropogenic change make natives into invaders?
• Are the Sentinelese the last untouched hunter-gatherer culture?
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• Despite great press for Dyson, the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is still not the solution to human cooperation
• Rachel Carson still under attack for bringing her values to bear on her science
• Bacterial societies defy selfish gene predictions
• “School of Life” acknowledges the values in religion worth preserving
• Open and fluid, science even requires constant revision of logos
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• Infographic signs on the road to game theory understanding
• Can crocheting help save corals? Can we learn something about developmental genetics in the process?
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• Preview of the 2012 Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Climate change makes mountaineering more risky
• New evidence for gene-culture evolution in Native Americans
• Australopithecus sediba fossils reveal a more apelike diet
• Drift may be not be specific to genetic systems
• When any behavior can be modeled, real-world constraint is critical
• Experimental study of cooperation and population structure calls into question the importance of heterogeneity
• Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics hosts conference on the role of cooperation in major evolutionary transitions
• Mount Everest and the limits of play
• Additional theoretical study insists that population structure does promote cooperation
• I am finally diving into NetLogo!
• 7000 year old fossil human DNA discovered
• New fossil find pushes back the origin of bilaterally symmetrical multicellular organisms
• Matthew Zimmerman on how international relations views the evolution of groups
• High-throughput screening accelerates the rate at which evolved plant chemicals can be turned into medicine
• Changing rice from C3 to C4 in order to feed our growing population
• If your loners are truly loners they won’t punish, and cooperation thrives even in the presence of antisocial punishment
• Larry Arnhart on Singer, Bowles, and Gintis and Darwinian libertarianism
• A victory for collective action and national cooperation
• Australopithecus sediba was a C3 muncher (so say the teeth)
• Antibiotic overuse: a porcine tragedy of the commons
• Identifying the genes that gave dolphins their big brains
• Perhaps nestedness is just an artifact of ecological opportunity (and not stability)
• Condors, hunters, and the National Rifle Association
• Jerry Coyne refutes the E.O. Wilson NYT piece
• E.O. Wilson on the biological origins of sin and virtue
• A new salvo in the punishment wars: if everyone can punish, defectors triumph
• Call it “ethnocentrism” or the “green beard effect”, “tags” assist cooperation
• Sometimes our simulations have more to tell than we first see
• A final solution to the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma?
• On Being features David Sloan Wilson
• Daniel Dennett on Darwin and Turing’s “strange inversion of reasoning”
• Macroevolutionary change: do successful lineages have “evolvability” or “survivability”?
• Evolution may be too slow: British Columbia begins assisted migration of forests
• Diving bell spider fashions its own scuba tanks
• Wasps can recognize each other, by face
• National Geographic goes looking for heat-loving bacteria in a very cold place
• National Geographic feature on “Vanishing Languages”
• Shark species may be more cryptic than previously understood
• Peter Turchin on Steven Pinker’s “Grand Deception” hypotheses
• Steven Pinker makes it clear that he is not a “group selectionist”
• Are the population dynamics of Dupont’s lark dictated by multilevel selective pressures?
• Once again Jerry Coyne goes ad hominem to defend evolutionary orthodoxy
• Bird study suggests that multilevel selection theory is necessary to understand population dynamics
• Is sexual practice coevolving with our cultural technologies?
• Could differential symbiosis be a mechanism by which genetically-variable hosts speciate?
• Apparently you need to know something about rare granite erosion to understand the evolution of multicellularity
• Music evolves (culturally!) from noise to song under the influence of human selection
• Nice summary piece on the state of research into human nature and morality by Agustín Fuentes
• Turtles caught in the act provide new paleontological insights
• Tim Birkenhead on anthropomorphism and animal emotion
• David Barash illuminates the “EvoPolitics” of Darwin’s time
• Are there genetic markers for ethnicity?
• Ted Kaczynski as a scholar of resistance to technology
• Understanding the role of the Templeton Foundation in funding evolutionary biology research
• Preschoolers cooperatively rock chimps in puzzle tournament
• Prominent evolutionary biologists weigh in on whether humans can evolve into a ‘superorganism’
• Mutualistic fungus transfers nitrogen from parasitized insects to its plant host
• A competitive nominee in the “weirdest YouTube video about a theoretical biology paper” category
• Gerald Carter produces an informative video on cooperation in vampire bats
• Familiarity breeds… mutual aid (at least in some birds)
• Interesting reports from the Consilience Conference
• Jason Collins questions the utility-to-fitness conversion
• Do you need cooperation in your model to explain why there are more right-handed people?
• Once your subject becomes a continuing education class…
• Scientific American “Why We Help”
• July issue of Scientific American will feature a cover story on the evolution of cooperation
• Who is the bigger bioterrorist, man or nature?
• Self-castration sometimes turns out to be good for reproductive success
• Kandyan dwarf toad removes itself from the IUCN Red List
• Longer telomeres imparted by older fathers may forestall senescence
• Honey bees harbor a remarkably diverse community of mutualistic gut microbes
• Peacocks communicate via the (ultra)sounds they make with their feathers
• Is Alzheimer’s disease caused by prion proliferation?
• “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” exhibit at the American Museum on Natural History
• Our brains are too smart to be tricked: diet sodas just make your body crave more calories
• In case you were a skeptic: bears can count
• Freaked out grasshoppers just do not contribute to decomposition in the same manner as their more relaxed brethren
• Surprisingly, rugby can be used to understand honest signaling
• Digital organisms yield new insights into the effects of extinction on long-term phylogenetic patterns of evolution
• Is human genetic research being hampered by a failure to share data?
• New study on birds uses remote tracking to provide detailed behavioral data
• A comparison of behaviorally-based animal diseases reminds us of the kingdom in which we belong
• New comprehensive data synthesis favors a pluralistic explanation for Eurasian mammoth extinction
• Now if you could only keep your cytosine methylated you might live forever
• Bonobo sequence establishes that humans are equally but dissimilarly related to our chimpanzee relatives
• Elinor Ostrom, pioneering social scientist and scholar of cooperation, is dead at 78
• “EvoLudo” site provides tutorials on evolutionary games related to cooperation
• “Evolution and Games” site provides tutorials on cooperation theory
• Can “muppet theory” help explain behavioral heterogeneity in human social groups?
• Vampire bats: the ideal organism for studying cooperation?
• NY Times provides perspective on E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• PNAS paper explores the role of population structure in facilitating reciprocity
• Richard Dawkins on E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• David Sloan Wilson on Richard Dawkins on E.O. Wilson
• Don’t mistake having a better map for knowing where you are: new technology for sequencing fetal DNA will not lead to serious trait selection
• Understanding the effects of asymmetry and relatedness on social volunteerism
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project launches with its first release of graphic packages
• There are plenty of organs out there: more altruism would end the social dilemma of who gets available organs
• Economic Whales and their Parasites
• More flatfish transitional fossils found
• Human limits extended one step further as wingsuit diver lands without a parachute
• Larry Arnhart reviews E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• David Sloan Wilson differentiates “Evolutionary Religious Studies” from “The New Atheism”
• Peter Turchin on the “Dark Side of Cultural Evolution”
• Social Evolution Forum takes on role of social networking in human cooperation
• {Canis lupus familiaris + Homo sapiens} versus Homo neanderthalenthis?
• Is the origin of all life the gyre?
• S.E. Gould takes on sloppy use of the selfish gene metaphor
• Alife XIII conference explores the simulation of artificial life
• Why don’t other animals make better use of punishment?
• Conservation Biology that acknowledges that we can never go back
• Can cod come back?
• I knew that dog was watching me: Jennifer Verdolin confirms my worst fears
• If you don’t think that culture can make us do maladaptive things, check out “trepanning”
• Richard Sennett’s “Together” explores the history of cooperative rituals
• National Academies Press releases proceedings for “Cooperation and Conflict” colloquium
• “Open Yale” course provides the fundamentals of Game Theory for free
• John Horgan reviews Robert Trivers’ “The Folly of Fools”
• James K. Galbraith makes the connection between debt policy and social stability
• BBC covers the up side of the North Pacific plastic “garbage patch”
• Short interview with Mark Pagel in The Guardian
• Olivia Judson reviews Mark Pagel’s “Wired for Culture”
• Are dolphins on their way to domesticating humans?
• I am not the only one who likes to narrowly interpret creative works through my scientific lens
• NPR drops dumb Bell Curve segment
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: Ultimatum Game “conceptual” images
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First “sequence” images
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: New “conceptual” images
• What kind of in-group does Facebook represent?
• Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild”
• Is the European Union going rogue or playing altruist on airline emissions?
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First “examples” matrices
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First images
• Howard Rheingold TED talk urges a global movement to study cooperation
• Science in Art & Design: Justin Taylor’s “The Gospel of Anarchy”
• Costly signalling not so costly in the presence of comrades
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Eco-mysticism in the Ecology Classroom, Discontinuity in Evolutionary Theory
• Naturalistic Fallacy: 1, Sam Harris: 0
• Patterns in mussel beds may reflect interaction between individual behavior and emergent environmental patterns
• How the right wing co-opts research into the evolution of cooperation
• Rand and Nowak paper on antisocial punishment in public goods games
• Is humanity’s most dangerous technology debt?
• Martin Nowak lecture on The Evolution of Cooperation at MIT
• What can Dean Potter teach us about evolution?
• If Only Game Designers Were Scientists
• Understanding Rupert Murdoch from an Evolutionary Perspective
• Epigenetics on Leonard Lopate
• Aquaculture on Leonard Lopate
• Mexican Culture and Collective Action
• Economics and Human Satisfaction
• Easy-IPD version 1.0 released!
• “DNA” by James D. Watson
• Barash and Lipton on Bin Laden (and Us)
• NY Times way behind the times on Nature versus Nurture
• Being Clean Might Make You Allergic
• Sex and Slime on Fresh Air
• “A Paradise Built in Hell” by Rebecca Solnit
• Contemporary Human Cooperation With Non-Kin Probably No Mistake
• Cultural Evolution in a Hybrid Society
• Make Every Day Darwin Day, Minus the Darwin
• Computer-Based Tools for Teaching about Robert Axelrod’s Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments
• The beginning of sex as we know it
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• In the Light of Evolution V: Cooperation (January 7th)
• In the Light of Evolution V: Cooperation (An Abbreviated and Incomplete Social Network Analysis of the Speakers)
• E.O. Wilson’s “The Four Great Books of Darwin”
• Is the “hopelessly incomplete” fossil record a little better than we give it credit for?
• Official video of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010
• Delayed Development and Human Evolution
• Greg Graffin on The Takeaway
• Scientific American “Controlling the Brain with Light”
• The Role of Technology in Human Evolution
• National Geographic’s “Science of Dogs”
• Robert Trivers and colleagues on Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson’s “The evolution of eusociality”
• Firefighting and the Tragedy of the Commons
• Asian Carp on NPR
• The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution
• Sourcing sources of selection
• Do you still think God is good?
• Teaching evolution and game theory, simultaneously
• NPR is all up in evolution
• Evolution 2010 (Overall Impressions)
• Evolution 2010 Day 5 (June 29th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 4 (June 28th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 3 (June 27th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 2 (June 26th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 1 (June 25th)
• Darwin’s Cathedral versus The God Delusion
• The Quest for the Perfect Hive
• Consilience
• Understanding biome-level response to climate change
• National Geographic “Fatal Attraction”
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday): Afternoon sessions
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – Mutualistic Networks Symposium
• ESA 2009 Meeting Day #2 (Monday)
• Patternicity and that jerk on the cell phone
• Human Adaptation and Happiness
• Common Ground Symposium at Columbia University
• An Introduction

MSWI-270C, Ecology, Environment, & the Anthropocene (2)

• STEAMplant project brings local primary school kids to Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden
• How will the COVID-19 crisis affect action on climate change?
• Core of Me short video
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2019)
• Eco-Performance Lab during Pratt’s 2019 Green Week the first step of “To the Core of Me”
• My newest STEAMplant collaboration is “To the Core of Me: A Hike Play”
• My interview with Ardis DeFreece has been published in SciArt Magazine
• YES, microplastics end up in our guts. Now the question is from where? And to what effect?
• How renewable power sources grow more trees
• Australia’s a hot spot for climate change politics, climate change science, and climate change suffering
• Humans arrive, other mammals shrink
• Don’t blame people for being obese (blame their neighborhood)
• Mom leaves, offspring get buff and work together
• Wildfires driven more by lowered precipitation than elevated temperatures or reduced snowpack
• Are corals riding ocean currents to exert climate change dominance over macroalgae?
• We aren’t the only gardeners on Madgascar
• Meta-analysis suggests that pesticides impair bee memory and learning
• No-till has some big no-catastrophic-climate-change potential
• What might we discover in the ocean twilight zone?
• Parasites better watch out for parasites!
• Model suggests that warming climate will catalyze greater insect-pest crop losses
• Escape is a big risk in aquaculture
• Is it possible that Trump’s science-adviser is a stealth climate-change accepter?
• Is sexualization of women driven by the structure of our economy?
• Both primates have their own uses for the same land
• Can a realistically-parameterized model tell us why our brains are so big?
• Professor Jensen’s Guide to Urban Cycling
• PBS’ Deep Look on mole crabs
• PBS’ Deep Look on Firefly communication and deception
• I will present my EnviroAtlas class activities at NCSE 2018
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2017)
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Deep Look on nutrient transport by salmon
• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• BLUE WEEK 2017 comes to Pratt Institute
• Urban Transect Walks: helping your students see the overlap between ecological and social patterns
• Hey, ho, Portland Oregon ESA 2017, let’s go!
• My review of new edited Trophic Ecology book out in the Quarterly Review of Biology
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2017)
• Pratt News features short piece on Dr. Roland Kays’s campus visit
• Republicans release climate change plan based on “Respiration Reduction”
• Green Week 2017 opens at Pratt Institute
• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• Like boats & science?… this might be the artist’s residency for you!
• Science and art in dialogue: Pratt Manhattan Gallery hosts Dr. Rachael Winfree
• Eco 101: Exponential Growth & Decay
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Hedgehogs, Raccoons, and Urbanite Biophilia
• Skeptoid podcast on Colony Collapse Disorder
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2016)
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• 2016 Sustainability Summit live on Pratt’s Video Site
• Concerned about NYC’s air quality? Here’s a quick page to check…
• Want to know where NYC’s water supply stands? There’s a DEP page for that!
• My ecological footprint for 2016-2017
• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• Sustainability Summit at Pratt Institute featuring Josh Fox
• Biophotovoltaics: a promising design innovation, or a great example of lack of quantitative design?
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2016)
• Where’s the world’s biggest solar-electric power station going to be located?
• It’s good to remember how fast things change, culturally & biologically
• My ecological footprint for 2015-2016
• Alternative music legend Morrissey agrees to adopt 2 million feral cats in win-win for felines, Australian native fauna
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• Students succeed in convincing the Pratt Board of Trustees to divest from fossil fuels
• Like to forage for mushrooms? Beware the Amanita!
• I am honored to be visiting the Green Meadow Waldorf School as part of their week-long Sustainability workshop
• “This is the Nature of Cities” podcast on urban bees and civic ecology
• “Science: A Candle in the Dark” podcast on Urban Ecology
• “In Defense of Plants” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the return of five-lined skinks
• Announcing “Eco 101”, a series of blog posts on the basics of ecology
• Why are architects required to take a course focused on ecology and environmental science?
• Eco 101: Carrying Capacity
• An eye is not an eye is not an eye
• Food is personal, sometimes ethical, but rarely political
• Is New York City a “sustainable” metropolis?
• Clever study shows how cooperative bacteria sanction — and therefore exclude — cheaters
• Can understanding cooperation lead to higher-yield crops?
• Lev Ginzburg Fest: celebration of a “retirement”
• It was an honor to talk to St. Francis College!
• My first “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators” talk: next Friday at St. Francis College
• Crucial climate talks in Paris take place in a socially repressive environment
• Are technological optimists too optimistic about technological sustainability?
• Jonathan Haidt on the business advantage of being ethical
• Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
• China shifts a failed cultural policy designed to stabilize population
• Major masts made by multiplicative modification
• Does the rapid spread of a culture of over-exploitation intensify our impact on wild food sources?
• Are parasites really ecologically necessary?
• Shark attacks are down, but you still have to make good decisions out there on the ocean
• While we vacuum the seas, we may as well clean them of debris…
• Cargo ships a major source of NOx emissions
• Why the “just burn it all” approach to ending fossil fuel dependence does not work
• Mist net photographs as art?
• Charismatic megafauna offer protection to their less appealing heterospecifics
• Urbanization is not urbanization: density, not size, drives sustainability
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• Without sustainability in our diets, we won’t be sustainable
• ECOmotion Studios on Huffaker’s crazy experiments to make prey and predators coexist
• ECOmotion Studios on Simberloff & Wilson’s island biogeography experiments
• ECOmotion Studios on Hairston Smith Slobodkin and why the earth is green
• EcoMotion studios celebrates Robert Paine’s Pisaster experiments
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on synanthropes and urban island castaways
• Should we compromise with nations that hunt whales?
• Are big corporate polluters trying to “artwash” their image?
• Formation of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution has the potential to catalyze research into how culture evolves
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• Can good design make highways less of a problem?
• Rule number one of cooperative bacterial warfare? Be in the majority.
• WmD Episode #00003 has been released
• Carrying capacity — but not growth rate — varies with habitat quality (at least for moose)
• Go mutualistic or go home?
• WmD Episode #00002 has been released
• So much for the big-brained city bird theory?
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on big animals in big cities
• Rivers, Lakes, Seas, and Environmental Justice
• Urban tree power
• My new favorite concept mapping activity: depicting whole-system ecological flows
• Evolution beyond adaptation: a critical step for evolutionary theory
• Sadly, the Population Bombers (mostly) still don’t get it
• Court Ruling in the Netherlands may point the way to cracking the climate compliance conundrum
• Zoonosis, Ebola, and the Elusive Reservoir Host
• Is the threat of regulation enough to incentivize cooperation from nitrogen polluters?
• In the end, climate compromise comes down to writing and editing
• Grass on a Pedestal
• The costly nature of wind pollination
• New article in Science provides a comprehensive overview and update on Yellowstone National Park
• My ecological footprint for 2014-2015
• On the verge of 400 ppm Carbon Dioxide: a symbolic threshold
• PCB Bioaccumulation and Polar Bear Penises
• The Big Questions in Ecology and Evolution
• My review of the “Encyclopedia of Theoretical Ecology” published in QRB
• Water, Alfalfa, China, and a modern Tragedy of the Commons
• Evolution 2014: Day 2
• Evolution 2014: Day 1
• Evolution 2014: Could the right symbionts provide protection from chytrid infection to amphibians?
• Evolution 2014: Are island mutualist communities more likely to be nested because they are inherently more unstable?
• Evolution 2014: Is thyme a facultative mutualist with leguminous plants?
• Evolution 2014: Lemurs display huge diet diversity, and their gut microbes track this diversity
• Evolution 2014: Aphids protect themselves from parasitoids by harboring a bacteria whose viral parasite is toxic
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Evolution 2014: Evolution of cooperation in the high school classroom? You bet!
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• John Oliver holds first “balanced” climate debate on television
• Our review paper on Late Pleistocene Extinction Modeling published in QRB!
• Is “nest parasitism” really “nest mutualism”?
• There’s No Such Thing as Qualitative Sustainability
• New glacial maximum on Mount ARC provides definitive evidence that Pratt’s sustainability efforts are working
• I receive funding to initiate the WmD Project
• Interesting numbers on the sustainability (or lack thereof) of the aviation industry
• If sloths endure costs to maintain closed-loop agricultural systems, why can’t we?
• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• Was Teilhard de Chardin the real inventor of an evolutionary approach to culture?
• Understanding the cascading effect of carnivore loss… before we lose all the carnivores
• Why socially-progressive scientists should not make bets…
• Cod gone on Cape Cod
• Concentrated factory farming of livestock massively alters the phosphorus cycle
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• CNN tackles climate change by explaining public goods games!
• Now legal, Northern California’s pot farms join the rest of agriculture in impacting water supply
• Nice infographic on global and domestic food waste
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• Would a different term make us better appreciate ecosystem services?
• Caterpillars weaponize nicotine
• Microbes may surf their way to successful cooperation
• An amazing indictment of the academic publishing industry (in which most of us participate)
• Should we emulate the cooperative and conservative habits of the sloth?
• Additional evidence that obesity may be due to environment, not just habits
• A tour of your diverse microbiome, and the things that might deplete that diversity
• With all we know, we still know too little to reliably re-engineer ecosystems
• New evidence of whooping crane culture on the rebound
• Schadenfreude as an instinct born of being a social, hierarchical animal
• Cooperative child-rearing pays dividends for ruffed lemurs, irrespective of kinship
• National Geographic “The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion”
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Where to publish in ecology & evolution without funding for page charges
• Mammal monogamy still a mystery, but maybe more than a numbers game
• Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno
• Great NPR piece on how simple it would be for us to reduce carbon emissions
• Working on a VUE concept map of the fieldTest simulation
• NPR piece suggests that economics are pushing us towards nutrient recycling
• My review of Railsback and Grimm’s “Agent-based and individual-based modeling” textbook published in Ecology
• “Earth Hour” seeks to re-focus our attention on all the earth provides
• Forward on Climate Rally seeks to shift the national dialogue on anthropogenic climate change
• Quantifying the climate value of that 40-acre woodlot
• Dog license dataset opens up huge potential for understanding the dog-human mutualism
• Production on marginal lands can meet only 25% of our biofuel mandates
• Charlotte Douglas International Airport employs worms to close the loop on airport waste
• Fracking study retracted after the discovery of a massive conflict of interest
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• National Geographic feature on penguin propulsion
• Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• Megan Frederickson shares the wonder of ant cooperation with Toronto Library patrons
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• Michael Ruse on James Lovelock’s Gaia of 2012
• Rogue iron fertilization? Things have gotten weird!
• Rob Nixon on Rachel Carson’s prescience
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• Barry Commoner, pioneering scientist and environmentalist, is dead at 95
• Some conservatives actually see the public health and economic dilemmas posed by greenhouse gas emissions
• Can proper education allow reputation to foster action on climate change?
• Want a good gauge of how much humans pollute waterways? Just measure for caffeine!
• The humble Mistletoe turns out to be a probable keystone species
• Climate and Clean Air Coalition unites air pollution concerns
• Reductions in fertilizer use are now worth carbon credits
• Does anthropogenic change make natives into invaders?
• Are the Sentinelese the last untouched hunter-gatherer culture?
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• Rachel Carson still under attack for bringing her values to bear on her science
• Rebranding global warming as a health threat
• Bacterial societies defy selfish gene predictions
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• “Adaptive” approach to climate change puts faith in resilience thinking
• My review of “How Species Interact” published in Ecological Modelling
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• ESA 2012 Workshop #8, Getting off the Ground with Individual-Based Modeling: A Primer for Instructors and Researchers
• The many ecotones of the Columbia Gorge
• Preview of the 2012 Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Mark Bittman on the ecological imperative of eating less meat
• Climate change makes mountaineering more risky
• Acid rain policy changes yield slow but real ecological results
• High-throughput screening accelerates the rate at which evolved plant chemicals can be turned into medicine
• Fences exclude invasive predators, give aid to threatened Hawaiian birds
• Macroecologists weigh in on how well sustainability science considers ecological limits
• High tech ad hoc fixes face off against good old-fashioned prevention in the Baltic Sea
• The ecological impacts of the BP-Deepwater Horizon oil spill quantified
• Perhaps nestedness is just an artifact of ecological opportunity (and not stability)
• Condors, hunters, and the National Rifle Association
• Evolution may be too slow: British Columbia begins assisted migration of forests
• Extensive long-term studies document the effect of biodiversity in ecosystem productivity
• National Geographic goes looking for heat-loving bacteria in a very cold place
• National Geographic’s “If They Could Only Talk” considers Easter Island’s many mysteries
• Are the population dynamics of Dupont’s lark dictated by multilevel selective pressures?
• New study published in Ecology Letters quantifies the effects of intensive agriculture on large-scale biodiversity
• Bird study suggests that multilevel selection theory is necessary to understand population dynamics
• Most people (at least in Spain) recognize the value of ecosystem services, but their valuation varies
• Could differential symbiosis be a mechanism by which genetically-variable hosts speciate?
• Would you like a few red-listed species with that shrimp cocktail sir?
• Mutualistic fungus transfers nitrogen from parasitized insects to its plant host
• North Carolina legislators enact strict law limiting the rate of natural change
• Do you need cooperation in your model to explain why there are more right-handed people?
• Scientific American “Why We Help”
• Who is the bigger bioterrorist, man or nature?
• There is no doubt that there are conservation trade-offs associated with the proliferation of wind power
• Brian Czech warns ecologists against drinking the “sustainable growth Koolaid”
• Honey bees harbor a remarkably diverse community of mutualistic gut microbes
• Lyme disease extensification may have more to do with foxes than deer
• “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” exhibit at the American Museum on Natural History
• Freaked out grasshoppers just do not contribute to decomposition in the same manner as their more relaxed brethren
• Aquatic food chains have gotten longer and less diverse over evolutionary time
• Digital organisms yield new insights into the effects of extinction on long-term phylogenetic patterns of evolution
• Mesocosm experiment considers the effects of human modification of community structure
• Big felines have lots of commensal fans
• The Australian Government blocks coal mine to protect the Great Barrier Reef
• Does climate change have the potential to reduce the stabilizing effects of biodiversity?
• Understanding the effects of asymmetry and relatedness on social volunteerism
• Economic Whales and their Parasites
• Will invasive truffles become the bane of European epicures?
• Are the most lucrative components of the financial sector parasites on the larger economy?
• How fast do anthropogenic impacts get amplified up the food chain? Ask a bluefin!
• Paulinella chromatophora’s photosynthetic engine blurs the line between endosymbiont and organelle
• An argument for better Frankensteins (and thus more prudent use of technology)
• Can cod come back?
• Molly H. Adams earns top honors from the Critical and Visual Studies program
• James K. Galbraith makes the connection between debt policy and social stability
• BBC covers the up side of the North Pacific plastic “garbage patch”
• Painting called “Endosymbiosis” honors the legacy of Lynn Margulis
• 2012 Sustainability Crash Course at Pratt Institute
• Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild”
• Steven Railsback and Volker Grimm offer new introduction to the process of agent- and individual-based modeling
• Is the European Union going rogue or playing altruist on airline emissions?
• Joel E. Cohen on the 7 billion human mark
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• Howard Rheingold TED talk urges a global movement to study cooperation
• There’s Dirt Under Them Thar Sidewalks
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Patterns in mussel beds may reflect interaction between individual behavior and emergent environmental patterns
• Online tools for teaching the basics of population growth
• Hurricane Irene evacuation naysayers point out some fundamental human problems with understanding risk
• If Only Game Designers Were Scientists
• Aquaculture on Leonard Lopate
• Sex and Slime on Fresh Air
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• Saving Puffins, One Clip at a Time
• Mirsky on Poop in Space
• Using Ecological Footprints to Teach Sustainability
• Are Eco-labels an Effective Tool for Conservation?
• Official video of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010
• National Geographic’s “Science of Dogs”
• 2010 Convention on Biological Diversity and Ecosystem Services (Sorta)
• Asian Carp on NPR
• National Geographic “Wolf Wars”
• The Cove
• Steven Chillrud Visit to Pratt Institute
• Vegans and the Quest for Sanity
• ESA 2010 (Overall Impressions)
• ESA 2010 Day 6 (August 6th)
• ESA 2010 Day 5 (August 5th)
• ESA 2010 Day 4 (August 4th)
• ESA 2010 Day 3 (August 3rd)
• ESA 2010 Day 2 (August 2nd)
• ESA 2010 Day 1 (August 1st)
• Understanding biome-level response to climate change
• National Geographic “Fatal Attraction”
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – “Big Models” Special Session
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday): Afternoon sessions
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – Mutualistic Networks Symposium
• ESA 2009 Meeting Day #2 (Monday)
• ESA 2009 Day #1 (Sunday)
• Changing and not changing the way we use our agricultural land
• Human Adaptation and Happiness
• An Introduction

Multilevel Selection (39)

• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• Understanding [culture + multilevel selection] = potential for Sustainability
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• Jonathan Haidt on the business advantage of being ethical
• Major masts made by multiplicative modification
• Group phenotypic composition: implications for individuals and their groups
• Asymmetrical interaction best explained by superrational rather than rational strategy
• Have we outgrown the scale of cooperation supported by the Big Gods of Big Religion?
• Evolution beyond adaptation: a critical step for evolutionary theory
• Can we resolve the ‘group selection debate’ by focusing on human cooperation?
• Our paper on a super-rational solution to the tragedy of the commons published in Scientific Reports
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Evolution 2014: Evolution of cooperation in the high school classroom? You bet!
• Money Talking about Janet Yellen and multilevel selection
• Writing and record-keeping as important tools in the evolution of large-scale human cooperation
• My review of “Origins of Altruism and Cooperation” is published in QRB
• Freeman Dyson wins the contest, and then says the contest is stupid
• Enforcing norms may be for personal gain, not to maintain social order (at least amongst Santa Barbara undergraduates)
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• Matthew Zimmerman on how international relations views the evolution of groups
• Jerry Coyne refutes the E.O. Wilson NYT piece
• Steven Pinker makes it clear that he is not a “group selectionist”
• Are the population dynamics of Dupont’s lark dictated by multilevel selective pressures?
• Bird study suggests that multilevel selection theory is necessary to understand population dynamics
• Music evolves (culturally!) from noise to song under the influence of human selection
• David Barash illuminates the “EvoPolitics” of Darwin’s time
• What kind of in-group does Facebook represent?
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• Science in Art & Design: Justin Taylor’s “The Gospel of Anarchy”
• Naturalistic Fallacy: 1, Sam Harris: 0
• Martin Nowak lecture on The Evolution of Cooperation at MIT
• Understanding Rupert Murdoch from an Evolutionary Perspective
• Barash and Lipton on Bin Laden (and Us)
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• Robert Trivers and colleagues on Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson’s “The evolution of eusociality”
• Firefighting and the Tragedy of the Commons
• The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution
• Darwin’s Cathedral versus The God Delusion

Museum design (2)

• I will be participating in the 2019 NCEP Teaching & Learning Studio
• “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” exhibit at the American Museum on Natural History

Museums & Zoos (2)

Music (4)

• Music, the cortisone balm?
• Seth Horowitz on our perception of sound
• Music evolves (culturally!) from noise to song under the influence of human selection
• Greg Graffin on The Takeaway

Mutualism (42)

• STEAMplant project brings local primary school kids to Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden
• We aren’t the only gardeners on Madgascar
• Meta-analysis suggests that pesticides impair bee memory and learning
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Deep Look on nutrient transport by salmon
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• Science and art in dialogue: Pratt Manhattan Gallery hosts Dr. Rachael Winfree
• Skeptoid podcast on Colony Collapse Disorder
• Like to forage for mushrooms? Beware the Amanita!
• “This is the Nature of Cities” podcast on urban bees and civic ecology
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the return of five-lined skinks
• Can understanding cooperation lead to higher-yield crops?
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on synanthropes and urban island castaways
• My new favorite concept mapping activity: depicting whole-system ecological flows
• The costly nature of wind pollination
• Evolution 2014: Day 2
• Evolution 2014: Day 1
• Evolution 2014: Could the right symbionts provide protection from chytrid infection to amphibians?
• Evolution 2014: Are island mutualist communities more likely to be nested because they are inherently more unstable?
• Evolution 2014: Is thyme a facultative mutualist with leguminous plants?
• Evolution 2014: Lemurs display huge diet diversity, and their gut microbes track this diversity
• Evolution 2014: Aphids protect themselves from parasitoids by harboring a bacteria whose viral parasite is toxic
• Is “nest parasitism” really “nest mutualism”?
• If sloths endure costs to maintain closed-loop agricultural systems, why can’t we?
• Should we emulate the cooperative and conservative habits of the sloth?
• Additional evidence that obesity may be due to environment, not just habits
• A tour of your diverse microbiome, and the things that might deplete that diversity
• Cooperative child-rearing pays dividends for ruffed lemurs, irrespective of kinship
• Dog license dataset opens up huge potential for understanding the dog-human mutualism
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• Megan Frederickson shares the wonder of ant cooperation with Toronto Library patrons
• Bacterial societies defy selfish gene predictions
• Perhaps nestedness is just an artifact of ecological opportunity (and not stability)
• Could differential symbiosis be a mechanism by which genetically-variable hosts speciate?
• Mutualistic fungus transfers nitrogen from parasitized insects to its plant host
• Honey bees harbor a remarkably diverse community of mutualistic gut microbes
• “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” exhibit at the American Museum on Natural History
• Understanding the effects of asymmetry and relatedness on social volunteerism
• Paulinella chromatophora’s photosynthetic engine blurs the line between endosymbiont and organelle
• Painting called “Endosymbiosis” honors the legacy of Lynn Margulis
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• Howard Rheingold TED talk urges a global movement to study cooperation
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• National Geographic’s “Science of Dogs”
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – Mutualistic Networks Symposium

Mutualistic Networks (3)

• Evolution 2014: Are island mutualist communities more likely to be nested because they are inherently more unstable?
• Perhaps nestedness is just an artifact of ecological opportunity (and not stability)
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – Mutualistic Networks Symposium

My publications (15)

• My entry on the evolution of play will be added to the massive Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science
• My review of new edited Trophic Ecology book out in the Quarterly Review of Biology
• 2016 Sustainability Summit live on Pratt’s Video Site
• My article on adolescence featured in the This View of Life culture series
• You can check out my first Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk (at St. Francis College) on YouTube
• WmD Episode #00002 has been released
• Our paper on a super-rational solution to the tragedy of the commons published in Scientific Reports
• My review of the “Encyclopedia of Theoretical Ecology” published in QRB
• My Evolution 2014 talk is on YouTube
• Our review paper on Late Pleistocene Extinction Modeling published in QRB!
• My review of “Origins of Altruism and Cooperation” is published in QRB
• My review of Railsback and Grimm’s “Agent-based and individual-based modeling” textbook published in Ecology
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• My review of “How Species Interact” published in Ecological Modelling
• Understanding the effects of asymmetry and relatedness on social volunteerism

Natural Selection (18)

• Humans arrive, other mammals shrink
• Support the mighty Bombardier Beetle’s quest to have its genome sequenced!
• My personal experience that creationists gravitate to anything with even the faintest scent of scientific uncertainty (and what to do about it)
• It was an honor to talk to St. Francis College!
• My first “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators” talk: next Friday at St. Francis College
• Jeremy Yoder on contemporary selection for increased human height
• Group phenotypic composition: implications for individuals and their groups
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Evolution 2014: Cooperative data collection is more meaningful than individual data collection
• Evolution 2014: Students can watch fly populations evolve in a matter of weeks
• Hawaiian crickets converge on the same solution to eavesdropping parasites
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• Barash not so enlightening on the paradox of human homosexuality
• Daniel Dennett on Darwin and Turing’s “strange inversion of reasoning”
• Steven Pinker makes it clear that he is not a “group selectionist”
• Once again Jerry Coyne goes ad hominem to defend evolutionary orthodoxy
• S.E. Gould takes on sloppy use of the selfish gene metaphor

Neuroscience (23)

• Can a realistically-parameterized model tell us why our brains are so big?
• Why Artists & Designers need Scientists: Exhibit A
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Hedgehogs, Raccoons, and Urbanite Biophilia
• Julia Buntaine explores the potential power of art and science collaborations
• My article on adolescence featured in the This View of Life culture series
• Pratt Foundation teams up with Brooklyn College pyschologists to study perception and drawing
• FDA investigators raid American Society of Human Genetics offices in Carl Zimmer cloning case
• Art in the Lab hosts Brain Awareness Week event on March 16th, 2016
• Dan Ariely’s “Arming the Donkeys” podcast
• What deficiencies in sound perception reveal about how we perceive sound
• What’s the evolved function of curiosity?
• Does Bayesian bias aid us in making adaptive distorted self-assessments?
• My testimonial for Gregory Tague’s “Evolution and Human Culture”
• Do creative people have “messy minds”?
• So much for the big-brained city bird theory?
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• Apparently I should stop holding my breath for the Google Translate “dolphin” module
• 0.5% to 3%: Do we now have a better sense of what makes people smart?
• Cognitive Ethology and Cat Companionship
• Do we need to delete to keep the web sustainable?
• String Theory: should we care?
• Seth Horowitz on our perception of sound
• If your “free will” is questionable, feel free to exercise your “free won’t”
• Do our brains require endurance activity in order to function?
• Multiple Intelligences theory gets some neuroscientific support
• Concept mapping as a creative tool
• Slate article explores the big brain, big society connection
• Chronicle of Higher Education feature explores the question of why more women do not succeed in science
• On becoming a psychopath
• Can neuroeconomics help economics become a real science?
• When any behavior can be modeled, real-world constraint is critical
• Identifying the genes that gave dolphins their big brains
• Daniel Dennett on Darwin and Turing’s “strange inversion of reasoning”
• Our brains are too smart to be tricked: diet sodas just make your body crave more calories
• Are dolphins on their way to domesticating humans?
• Scientific American “Controlling the Brain with Light”
• Consilience
• Patternicity and that jerk on the cell phone

Niche Partitioning (2)

• WmD Episode #00003 has been released
• Evolution 2014: Day 2

Nutrient Cycling (1)

• Deep Look on nutrient transport by salmon

Obituary (7)

• Alan Rabinowitz, 1953-2018
• Review of William B. Provine’s “The ‘Random Genetic Drift’ Fallacy”
• Barry Commoner, pioneering scientist and environmentalist, is dead at 95
• Elinor Ostrom, pioneering social scientist and scholar of cooperation, is dead at 78
• Marvin Charton, Pratt professor and renowned computational chemist, is dead at 80
• The tragically early passing of Fred Rubino, an influential Brooklyn educator
• Do you still think God is good?

Paleonotology (4)

• 7000 year old fossil human DNA discovered
• New fossil find pushes back the origin of bilaterally symmetrical multicellular organisms
• The beginning of sex as we know it
• Is the “hopelessly incomplete” fossil record a little better than we give it credit for?

Parasitism (25)

• Parasites better watch out for parasites!
• Food is personal, sometimes ethical, but rarely political
• Can understanding cooperation lead to higher-yield crops?
• Jonathan Haidt on the business advantage of being ethical
• Are parasites really ecologically necessary?
• Carrying capacity — but not growth rate — varies with habitat quality (at least for moose)
• Zoonosis, Ebola, and the Elusive Reservoir Host
• Evolution 2014: Day 2
• Evolution 2014: Day 1
• Evolution 2014: Could the right symbionts provide protection from chytrid infection to amphibians?
• Evolution 2014: Is thyme a facultative mutualist with leguminous plants?
• Evolution 2014: Aphids protect themselves from parasitoids by harboring a bacteria whose viral parasite is toxic
• Is “nest parasitism” really “nest mutualism”?
• Caterpillars weaponize nicotine
• Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno
• Megan Frederickson shares the wonder of ant cooperation with Toronto Library patrons
• The humble Mistletoe turns out to be a probable keystone species
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• Mutualistic fungus transfers nitrogen from parasitized insects to its plant host
• Who is the bigger bioterrorist, man or nature?
• Lyme disease extensification may have more to do with foxes than deer
• Economic Whales and their Parasites
• Are the most lucrative components of the financial sector parasites on the larger economy?
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – Mutualistic Networks Symposium

Parent-Offspring Conflict (1)

• David Haig suggests that babies cry at night to prevent siblings

Parenting (7)

• Mom leaves, offspring get buff and work together
• Great conversation at my Columbia University Population Biology Seminar talk
• What do we know about Cultural Transmission?
• My first “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators” talk: next Friday at St. Francis College
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• The often-large difference between “breeding” and “parenting”
• Anne-Marie Slaughter on the tradeoff between work and caregiving

Parthenogenesis (1)

• Urban Wildlife Podcast on synanthropes and urban island castaways

Partner Choice (2)

• Dan Ariely’s “Arming the Donkeys” podcast
• Clever study shows how cooperative bacteria sanction — and therefore exclude — cheaters

Periodicals (8)

• Scientific American drops special issue on “Science of Being Human”
• My entry on the evolution of play will be added to the massive Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science
• What open access evangelists often miss about the task at hand
• Open Access publishing and “peer review” fail the test of a well-designed hoax
• An amazing indictment of the academic publishing industry (in which most of us participate)
• Where to publish in ecology & evolution without funding for page charges
• Open and fluid, science even requires constant revision of logos
• Would online data repositories solve the problem of scientific fraud?

Phenotypic Plasticity (16)

• Fantastic piece on nature/nurture by Patrick F. Clarkin in TVOL
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• Group phenotypic composition: implications for individuals and their groups
• Does the ability to accumulate wealth make us value the future more?
• Our paper on a super-rational solution to the tragedy of the commons published in Scientific Reports
• Apparently I should stop holding my breath for the Google Translate “dolphin” module
• Zero determinant strategy is just another short-term adaptation
• Do our brains require endurance activity in order to function?
• Multiple Intelligences theory gets some neuroscientific support
• New PNAS special issue explores the developmental effects of early social environment
• Think that the DNA transfer is only from parents to offspring? Think again!
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• Peter Turchin on Steven Pinker’s “Grand Deception” hypotheses
• Freaked out grasshoppers just do not contribute to decomposition in the same manner as their more relaxed brethren
• Understanding biome-level response to climate change

Philosophy (10)

• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• The forces of cultural evolution push hard on political humor
• String Theory: should we care?
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• Does American faith in genetic determinism limit the achievement of our students?
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• “School of Life” acknowledges the values in religion worth preserving
• David Barash illuminates the “EvoPolitics” of Darwin’s time
• Naturalistic Fallacy: 1, Sam Harris: 0

Photography (5)

• Pratt News features short piece on Dr. Roland Kays’s campus visit
• Stunning archaeological find shocks the Pratt Photography Department
• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Science and art in dialogue: Pratt Manhattan Gallery hosts Dr. Rachael Winfree
• An eye is not an eye is not an eye

Phylogenetics (13)

• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• America Society of Primatologists condemns H. A. and Margret Rey, calls for Curious George boycott
• Open Tree of Life allows experts and novices alike to explore “the” phylogeny
• Evolution 2014: Day 1
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Hawaiian crickets converge on the same solution to eavesdropping parasites
• Okay, I admit it: I am a bit of a Neanderthal
• In bird reproduction, parasitism and cooperation coevolve
• Open and fluid, science even requires constant revision of logos
• “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” exhibit at the American Museum on Natural History
• Bonobo sequence establishes that humans are equally but dissimilarly related to our chimpanzee relatives
• “DNA” by James D. Watson
• E.O. Wilson’s “The Four Great Books of Darwin”
• The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution

Physics (2)

• Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson liberated after month-long kidnapping ordeal
• String Theory: should we care?

Play (16)

• My entry on the evolution of play will be added to the massive Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science
• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• Arming the Donkeys on kids, parenting, and Burning Man
• A potentially interesting Evolution of Play documentary
• I visit Pratt’s Poetics Lab focused on play
• What’s the evolved function of curiosity?
• E&E in A&D: The Armstrong Lie
• Review of What We Made by Tom Finkelpearl
• A nice synopsis of some reasons for laughter
• Taking risks for the data
• Montreal art installation rewards cooperative play with musical novelty
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• Climate change makes mountaineering more risky
• Mount Everest and the limits of play
• Human limits extended one step further as wingsuit diver lands without a parachute
• What can Dean Potter teach us about evolution?

Polar Marine (3)

• Why the “just burn it all” approach to ending fossil fuel dependence does not work
• National Geographic feature on penguin propulsion
• Rogue iron fertilization? Things have gotten weird!

Political Science (39)

• Australia’s a hot spot for climate change politics, climate change science, and climate change suffering
• Is it possible that Trump’s science-adviser is a stealth climate-change accepter?
• Food is personal, sometimes ethical, but rarely political
• Would a “labor economy” lead to different outcomes than the “capital economy”?
• Crucial climate talks in Paris take place in a socially repressive environment
• Formation of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution has the potential to catalyze research into how culture evolves
• Darwin in social context? Ric Brown’s fascinating survey of some important contemporaries
• Is the threat of regulation enough to incentivize cooperation from nitrogen polluters?
• In the end, climate compromise comes down to writing and editing
• The forces of cultural evolution push hard on political humor
• John Oliver holds first “balanced” climate debate on television
• Donald Trump saves CitiBike, proving that selfishness and cooperation are no longer opposed
• Nice infographic on global and domestic food waste
• Great NPR piece on how simple it would be for us to reduce carbon emissions
• Rhett Bradbury’s Master’s Thesis explores how gaming can foster political leadership
• Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
• Forward on Climate Rally seeks to shift the national dialogue on anthropogenic climate change
• NPR provides a quick overview of the human drive to reciprocate
• Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• Rob Nixon on Rachel Carson’s prescience
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• Some conservatives actually see the public health and economic dilemmas posed by greenhouse gas emissions
• Lack of complete transparency presents an obstacle but not a block to cooperation
• Matthew Zimmerman on how international relations views the evolution of groups
• North American federal governments seek to defund environmental and ecological science
• A victory for collective action and national cooperation
• Should conservation scientists also be advocates for particular policies?
• North Carolina legislators enact strict law limiting the rate of natural change
• Elinor Ostrom, pioneering social scientist and scholar of cooperation, is dead at 78
• An argument for better Frankensteins (and thus more prudent use of technology)
• Richard Sennett’s “Together” explores the history of cooperative rituals
• James K. Galbraith makes the connection between debt policy and social stability
• Hurricane Irene evacuation naysayers point out some fundamental human problems with understanding risk
• How the right wing co-opts research into the evolution of cooperation
• National Geographic “Can China go green?”
• Easy-IPD version 1.0 released!
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod

Pollination (9)

• STEAMplant project brings local primary school kids to Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden
• Meta-analysis suggests that pesticides impair bee memory and learning
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Science and art in dialogue: Pratt Manhattan Gallery hosts Dr. Rachael Winfree
• Skeptoid podcast on Colony Collapse Disorder
• “This is the Nature of Cities” podcast on urban bees and civic ecology
• The costly nature of wind pollination
• Perhaps nestedness is just an artifact of ecological opportunity (and not stability)
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – Mutualistic Networks Symposium

Pollution (46)

• YES, microplastics end up in our guts. Now the question is from where? And to what effect?
• Meta-analysis suggests that pesticides impair bee memory and learning
• Professor Jensen’s Guide to Urban Cycling
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• BLUE WEEK 2017 comes to Pratt Institute
• Science and art in dialogue: Pratt Manhattan Gallery hosts Dr. Rachael Winfree
• Skeptoid podcast on Colony Collapse Disorder
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• Concerned about NYC’s air quality? Here’s a quick page to check…
• My ecological footprint for 2016-2017
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• “In Defense of Plants” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Is New York City a “sustainable” metropolis?
• While we vacuum the seas, we may as well clean them of debris…
• Cargo ships a major source of NOx emissions
• Urbanization is not urbanization: density, not size, drives sustainability
• Without sustainability in our diets, we won’t be sustainable
• Are big corporate polluters trying to “artwash” their image?
• Is the threat of regulation enough to incentivize cooperation from nitrogen polluters?
• Grass on a Pedestal
• PCB Bioaccumulation and Polar Bear Penises
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• Interesting numbers on the sustainability (or lack thereof) of the aviation industry
• Concentrated factory farming of livestock massively alters the phosphorus cycle
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• Nice infographic on global and domestic food waste
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• NPR piece suggests that economics are pushing us towards nutrient recycling
• Fracking study retracted after the discovery of a massive conflict of interest
• Rob Nixon on Rachel Carson’s prescience
• Barry Commoner, pioneering scientist and environmentalist, is dead at 95
• Want a good gauge of how much humans pollute waterways? Just measure for caffeine!
• Climate and Clean Air Coalition unites air pollution concerns
• Reductions in fertilizer use are now worth carbon credits
• Does anthropogenic change make natives into invaders?
• Rachel Carson still under attack for bringing her values to bear on her science
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• Acid rain policy changes yield slow but real ecological results
• How fast do anthropogenic impacts get amplified up the food chain? Ask a bluefin!
• BBC covers the up side of the North Pacific plastic “garbage patch”
• Is the European Union going rogue or playing altruist on airline emissions?
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Using Ecological Footprints to Teach Sustainability
• Official video of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010
• Steven Chillrud Visit to Pratt Institute

Ponds & Lakes (6)

Population Genetics (13)

• Alan Rabinowitz, 1953-2018
• Another great Skeptoid episode, this one on race
• My personal experience that creationists gravitate to anything with even the faintest scent of scientific uncertainty (and what to do about it)
• Lev Ginzburg Fest: celebration of a “retirement”
• Jeremy Yoder on contemporary selection for increased human height
• Review of William B. Provine’s “The ‘Random Genetic Drift’ Fallacy”
• Group phenotypic composition: implications for individuals and their groups
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Evolution 2014: Cooperative data collection is more meaningful than individual data collection
• Evolution 2014: Students can watch fly populations evolve in a matter of weeks
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• The potential for human evolution has increased along with the population size of our species
• Barash not so enlightening on the paradox of human homosexuality

Population Growth (25)

Population Pressure (18)

• Urban Transect Walks: helping your students see the overlap between ecological and social patterns
• Moral Sense III approaches, June 2nd at St. Francis College
• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• An inspiring summit, but big challenges at home and afar…
• Great conversation at my Columbia University Population Biology Seminar talk
• Do we need to have a kinder, gentler one-child policy in Western industrial countries?
• Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
• China shifts a failed cultural policy designed to stabilize population
• Urbanization is not urbanization: density, not size, drives sustainability
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• Sadly, the Population Bombers (mostly) still don’t get it
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• Why socially-progressive scientists should not make bets…
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Joel E. Cohen on the 7 billion human mark
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• National Geographic “Can China go green?”

Pratt Academic Senate (1)

• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th

Pratt Institute (63)

• STEAMplant project brings local primary school kids to Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden
• Core of Me short video
• The first product of a three-year-long Faculty Learning Community project
• I will be a 2019-2020 Center for Teaching & Learning Fellow
• Eco-Performance Lab during Pratt’s 2019 Green Week the first step of “To the Core of Me”
• My newest STEAMplant collaboration is “To the Core of Me: A Hike Play”
• My interview with Ardis DeFreece has been published in SciArt Magazine
• Professor Jensen’s Guide to Urban Cycling
• Why Artists & Designers need Scientists: Exhibit A
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Pratt Math & Science Department conducts search for new Chairperson
• Transfer of Learning FLC to present at Pratt lunch event
• BLUE WEEK 2017 comes to Pratt Institute
• The argument against editing students’ drafts of written work
• Pratt News features short piece on Dr. Roland Kays’s campus visit
• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• Annual Horses on campus event to take place on April 12th
• Pratt Institute launches Pratt Shows dedicated website
• Stunning archaeological find shocks the Pratt Photography Department
• Green Week 2017 opens at Pratt Institute
• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Science and art in dialogue: Pratt Manhattan Gallery hosts Dr. Rachael Winfree
• 2016 Sustainability Summit live on Pratt’s Video Site
• Julia Buntaine explores the potential power of art and science collaborations
• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• An inspiring summit, but big challenges at home and afar…
• Sustainability Summit at Pratt Institute featuring Josh Fox
• I’ll be spreading the Learning Management System love at Pratt in early November
• Pratt students make the potential trip to Mars better designed
• Pratt Foundation teams up with Brooklyn College pyschologists to study perception and drawing
• It’s good to remember how fast things change, culturally & biologically
• Students succeed in convincing the Pratt Board of Trustees to divest from fossil fuels
• I visit Pratt’s Poetics Lab focused on play
• Why are architects required to take a course focused on ecology and environmental science?
• W.W. Norton’s new InQuizitive partner to the Bergstrom and Dugatkin Evolution textbook
• A chance to learn how an understanding of empathy can inform design
• Darwin in social context? Ric Brown’s fascinating survey of some important contemporaries
• Guerrilla Science at Figment Art Festival 2015
• Sabbatical, Sweet Sabbatical
• Celebrating Studios Days Spring 2015
• Envirolutions brings bottle transformation to Green Week 2015
• I am taking my semester of rest… come Fall 2015
• Today I am Associate Professor
• A modest presentation on Open Information Environments
• Envirolutions graduates its largest (and most celebrated) cohort
• It appears that Pratt is going to keep me
• New glacial maximum on Mount ARC provides definitive evidence that Pratt’s sustainability efforts are working
• Pledge, Petition, Protect! All at Green Week 2014!
• I receive funding to initiate the WmD Project
• TurnUp seeks to turn excess art materials into treasure, not trash
• I will participate in a roundtable discussion on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
• For the next eight months, the future of my career is (mostly) out of my hands
• What the move towards a more sustainable Pratt looks like…
• Recognizing the difference between what the big and small educational institutions offer
• My decision to make my course evaluations public
• Working on a VUE concept map of the fieldTest simulation
• “The Sustainable Use of Fisheries” now a part of the EcoEd Digital Library
• Pratt Institute holds 124th Commencement, special gallery show
• Envirolutions asks the Pratt community to identify where there is “room for improvement”
• Envirolutions club launches its “Room for Improvement” campaign
• Up-Goer Five text editor challenges you to make accessible explanations
• Mishele Lesser’s Genoscapes explores the meaning of human genetics
• Pratt Institute opens search for new full-time faculty member in the Math and Science Department
• Pratt Envirolutions Students Bring Recycling Bins to Campus
• Concept mapping as a creative tool
• Envirolutions students release Trash Tetris video to promote recycling bin launch
• PBS short profiles Pratt Institute
• I get downright evangelical about WordPress
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project launches with its first release of graphic packages
• Molly H. Adams earns top honors from the Critical and Visual Studies program
• Marvin Charton, Pratt professor and renowned computational chemist, is dead at 80
• Green Week events celebrate cycling and recycling
• 2012 Sustainability Crash Course at Pratt Institute
• Science in Art & Design: Justin Taylor’s “The Gospel of Anarchy”
• Pratt Envirolutions trumpets green initiatives during Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Pratt Envirolutions leads campaign for reusable containers
• Steven Chillrud Visit to Pratt Institute
• Quantitative Sustainability and the practice of Life Cycle Analysis

Predation (45)

• PBS’ Deep Look on mole crabs
• PBS’ Deep Look on Firefly communication and deception
• Deep Look on nutrient transport by salmon
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• Alternative music legend Morrissey agrees to adopt 2 million feral cats in win-win for felines, Australian native fauna
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the return of five-lined skinks
• Food is personal, sometimes ethical, but rarely political
• Major masts made by multiplicative modification
• Are parasites really ecologically necessary?
• Shark attacks are down, but you still have to make good decisions out there on the ocean
• ECOmotion Studios on Huffaker’s crazy experiments to make prey and predators coexist
• ECOmotion Studios on Hairston Smith Slobodkin and why the earth is green
• EcoMotion studios celebrates Robert Paine’s Pisaster experiments
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• WmD Episode #00002 has been released
• My new favorite concept mapping activity: depicting whole-system ecological flows
• Evolution beyond adaptation: a critical step for evolutionary theory
• Zoonosis, Ebola, and the Elusive Reservoir Host
• New article in Science provides a comprehensive overview and update on Yellowstone National Park
• Evolution 2014: Day 1
• Evolution 2014: Aphids protect themselves from parasitoids by harboring a bacteria whose viral parasite is toxic
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Evolution 2014: Evolution of cooperation in the high school classroom? You bet!
• Our review paper on Late Pleistocene Extinction Modeling published in QRB!
• Is “nest parasitism” really “nest mutualism”?
• If sloths endure costs to maintain closed-loop agricultural systems, why can’t we?
• Understanding the cascading effect of carnivore loss… before we lose all the carnivores
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• Caterpillars weaponize nicotine
• National Geographic “The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion”
• Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno
• National Geographic feature on penguin propulsion
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• Megan Frederickson shares the wonder of ant cooperation with Toronto Library patrons
• Does anthropogenic change make natives into invaders?
• My review of “How Species Interact” published in Ecological Modelling
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” exhibit at the American Museum on Natural History
• Freaked out grasshoppers just do not contribute to decomposition in the same manner as their more relaxed brethren
• Aquatic food chains have gotten longer and less diverse over evolutionary time
• Big felines have lots of commensal fans
• Asian Carp on NPR
• National Geographic “Fatal Attraction”
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – Mutualistic Networks Symposium

Prediction (8)

• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2019)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2017)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2017)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2016)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2016)
• Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
• Prominent evolutionary biologists weigh in on whether humans can evolve into a ‘superorganism’
• Hurricane Irene evacuation naysayers point out some fundamental human problems with understanding risk

Primates (10)

• We aren’t the only gardeners on Madgascar
• Both primates have their own uses for the same land
• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• America Society of Primatologists condemns H. A. and Margret Rey, calls for Curious George boycott
• Primates — but not their rodent relatives — can infer the effects of other individuals on resource availability
• Evolution 2014: Lemurs display huge diet diversity, and their gut microbes track this diversity
• New research suggests that chimpanzees understand that cooperation produces benefits
• Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, cannot triangulate punishment
• Preschoolers cooperatively rock chimps in puzzle tournament
• Bonobo sequence establishes that humans are equally but dissimilarly related to our chimpanzee relatives

Primatology (6)

• NPR features Christopher Boehm on the love-hate relationship we have people in power
• America Society of Primatologists condemns H. A. and Margret Rey, calls for Curious George boycott
• My testimonial for Gregory Tague’s “Evolution and Human Culture”
• My review of “Origins of Altruism and Cooperation” is published in QRB
• Preschoolers cooperatively rock chimps in puzzle tournament
• Bonobo sequence establishes that humans are equally but dissimilarly related to our chimpanzee relatives

Professional Societies (7)

• SSE tells HHS to acknowledge sex and gender diversity
• Urban Transect Walks: helping your students see the overlap between ecological and social patterns
• Hey, ho, Portland Oregon ESA 2017, let’s go!
• My article on adolescence featured in the This View of Life culture series
• America Society of Primatologists condemns H. A. and Margret Rey, calls for Curious George boycott
• Emerging Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution releases roadmap document
• ECOmotion Studios on Huffaker’s crazy experiments to make prey and predators coexist
• ECOmotion Studios on Simberloff & Wilson’s island biogeography experiments
• ECOmotion Studios on Hairston Smith Slobodkin and why the earth is green
• EcoMotion studios celebrates Robert Paine’s Pisaster experiments
• Formation of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution has the potential to catalyze research into how culture evolves
• Evolution 2016 meeting will feature evolution-themed art exhibit
• My Evolution 2014 talk is on YouTube
• Recommendations for creating a more student-centered classroom
• Evolution 2014: Overall Impressions
• Evolution 2014: Day 4
• Evolution 2014: Synthesis centers can serve as incubators if they buffer researchers from the risk of failure
• Evolution 2014: Day 3
• Evolution 2014: Day 2
• Evolution 2014: Want to teach both sides? Have your students deconstruct creationist propaganda!
• Evolution 2014: EvoGrader will take the grading out of assessing student learning outcomes
• Evolution 2014: A clever way to see if creationist students understand evolutionary concepts
• Evolution 2014: The Evolution Film Festival was on fire!
• Evolution 2014: Day 1
• Evolution 2014: Could the right symbionts provide protection from chytrid infection to amphibians?
• Evolution 2014: Are island mutualist communities more likely to be nested because they are inherently more unstable?
• Evolution 2014: Is thyme a facultative mutualist with leguminous plants?
• Evolution 2014: Lemurs display huge diet diversity, and their gut microbes track this diversity
• Evolution 2014: Aphids protect themselves from parasitoids by harboring a bacteria whose viral parasite is toxic
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Evolution 2014: Evolution of cooperation in the high school classroom? You bet!
• Evolution 2014: NSF RCN-UBE program a great way to fund collaborative educational efforts
• Evolution 2014: Cooperative data collection is more meaningful than individual data collection
• Evolution 2014: Students can watch fly populations evolve in a matter of weeks
• Evolution 2014: Darwin’s “Backyard Beagle”
• Evolution 2014: Preview
• An amazing indictment of the academic publishing industry (in which most of us participate)
• Where to publish in ecology & evolution without funding for page charges
• “The Sustainable Use of Fisheries” now a part of the EcoEd Digital Library
• Useful guides for writing good pseudocode
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• ESA 2012 Workshop #8, Getting off the Ground with Individual-Based Modeling: A Primer for Instructors and Researchers
• Preview of the 2012 Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Should conservation scientists also be advocates for particular policies?
• ESA 2010 (Overall Impressions)
• ESA 2010 Day 6 (August 6th)
• ESA 2010 Day 5 (August 5th)
• ESA 2010 Day 4 (August 4th)
• ESA 2010 Day 3 (August 3rd)
• ESA 2010 Day 2 (August 2nd)
• ESA 2010 Day 1 (August 1st)
• Evolution 2010 (Overall Impressions)
• Evolution 2010 Day 5 (June 29th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 4 (June 28th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 3 (June 27th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 2 (June 26th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 1 (June 25th)
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – “Big Models” Special Session
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday): Afternoon sessions
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – Mutualistic Networks Symposium
• ESA 2009 Meeting Day #2 (Monday)
• ESA 2009 Day #1 (Sunday)

Psychological Adaptation (26)

• My entry on the evolution of play will be added to the massive Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science
• Why Artists & Designers need Scientists: Exhibit A
• Fantastic piece on nature/nurture by Patrick F. Clarkin in TVOL
• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• My article on adolescence featured in the This View of Life culture series
• Dan Ariely’s “Arming the Donkeys” podcast
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• That beard and deep voice may be to put him in his place, not attract her
• What’s the evolved function of curiosity?
• Do creative people have “messy minds”?
• Does the ability to accumulate wealth make us value the future more?
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• String Theory: should we care?
• Can neuroeconomics help economics become a real science?
• Enforcing norms may be for personal gain, not to maintain social order (at least amongst Santa Barbara undergraduates)
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• E.O. Wilson on the biological origins of sin and virtue
• Peter Turchin on Steven Pinker’s “Grand Deception” hypotheses
• Olivia Judson reviews Mark Pagel’s “Wired for Culture”
• Martin Nowak lecture on The Evolution of Cooperation at MIT
• What can Dean Potter teach us about evolution?
• Economics and Human Satisfaction
• Barash and Lipton on Bin Laden (and Us)
• NPR is all up in evolution
• Patternicity and that jerk on the cell phone
• Human Adaptation and Happiness

Psychology (28)

• NPR features Christopher Boehm on the love-hate relationship we have people in power
• Pratt students make the potential trip to Mars better designed
• Pratt Foundation teams up with Brooklyn College pyschologists to study perception and drawing
• Dan Ariely’s “Arming the Donkeys” podcast
• What do we know about Cultural Transmission?
• How do we know when people are actually happy?
• How the built environment influences our ability to sustain personal and environmental commitments
• Crucial climate talks in Paris take place in a socially repressive environment
• What’s the evolved function of curiosity?
• Does Bayesian bias aid us in making adaptive distorted self-assessments?
• Malcolm Gladwell on the social contagion of mass shootings
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• My testimonial for Gregory Tague’s “Evolution and Human Culture”
• Do creative people have “messy minds”?
• Formation of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution has the potential to catalyze research into how culture evolves
• When it comes to sex, we are consumately proximate
• Do humans form genetically similar social groups independent of kinship?
• String Theory: should we care?
• Think the Milgram Experiments tell us something definitive about human nature? Think again!
• NPR provides a quick overview of the human drive to reciprocate
• On becoming a psychopath
• New PNAS special issue explores the developmental effects of early social environment
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• Can neuroeconomics help economics become a real science?
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, cannot triangulate punishment
• What kind of in-group does Facebook represent?
• Barash and Lipton on Bin Laden (and Us)

Public Art (6)

• Core of Me short video
• My interview with Ardis DeFreece has been published in SciArt Magazine
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Julia Buntaine explores the potential power of art and science collaborations
• Review of What We Made by Tom Finkelpearl
• Montreal art installation rewards cooperative play with musical novelty

Public Outreach (50)

• STEAMplant project brings local primary school kids to Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• “Mount H-Index”: I never made it to base camp, and I have still had some great adventures
• Pratt News features short piece on Dr. Roland Kays’s campus visit
• Support the mighty Bombardier Beetle’s quest to have its genome sequenced!
• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Like boats & science?… this might be the artist’s residency for you!
• Skeptoid podcast on Colony Collapse Disorder
• 2016 Sustainability Summit live on Pratt’s Video Site
• Julia Buntaine explores the potential power of art and science collaborations
• Concerned about NYC’s air quality? Here’s a quick page to check…
• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• An inspiring summit, but big challenges at home and afar…
• Sustainability Summit at Pratt Institute featuring Josh Fox
• Arming the Donkeys on kids, parenting, and Burning Man
• Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson liberated after month-long kidnapping ordeal
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• Great conversation at my Columbia University Population Biology Seminar talk
• Art in the Lab hosts Brain Awareness Week event on March 16th, 2016
• I am honored to be visiting the Green Meadow Waldorf School as part of their week-long Sustainability workshop
• My next Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk: Columbia University on March 7th, 2016
• “Science: A Candle in the Dark” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Dan Ariely’s “Arming the Donkeys” podcast
• Announcing “Eco 101”, a series of blog posts on the basics of ecology
• Emerging Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution releases roadmap document
• It was an honor to talk to St. Francis College!
• My first “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators” talk: next Friday at St. Francis College
• Open Book Publishers, an alternative model to academic presses
• Pivot #1: My popular science book idea may not get picked up by a literary agent
• Yeah, you can find me on Facebook and Google Plus now
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• Formation of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution has the potential to catalyze research into how culture evolves
• Evolution 2016 meeting will feature evolution-themed art exhibit
• Returning (somewhat reluctantly) to Twitter
• Resources for writing a popular science book (and particularly a proposal)
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on big animals in big cities
• Evolution 2014: Overall Impressions
• Evolution 2014: Synthesis centers can serve as incubators if they buffer researchers from the risk of failure
• Evolution 2014: The Evolution Film Festival was on fire!
• John Oliver holds first “balanced” climate debate on television
• Nice infographic on global and domestic food waste
• Up-Goer Five text editor challenges you to make accessible explanations
• Megan Frederickson shares the wonder of ant cooperation with Toronto Library patrons
• Rachel Carson still under attack for bringing her values to bear on her science
• Robert Krulwich on the value of telling stories about science
• Should conservation scientists also be advocates for particular policies?
• A competitive nominee in the “weirdest YouTube video about a theoretical biology paper” category
• Gerald Carter produces an informative video on cooperation in vampire bats
• I get downright evangelical about WordPress
• Make Every Day Darwin Day, Minus the Darwin

Public Policy (93)

• How will the COVID-19 crisis affect action on climate change?
• SSE tells HHS to acknowledge sex and gender diversity
• Australia’s a hot spot for climate change politics, climate change science, and climate change suffering
• Is it possible that Trump’s science-adviser is a stealth climate-change accepter?
• BLUE WEEK 2017 comes to Pratt Institute
• Urban Transect Walks: helping your students see the overlap between ecological and social patterns
• Republicans release climate change plan based on “Respiration Reduction”
• Green Week 2017 opens at Pratt Institute
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• 2016 Sustainability Summit live on Pratt’s Video Site
• Want to know where NYC’s water supply stands? There’s a DEP page for that!
• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• An inspiring summit, but big challenges at home and afar…
• Where’s the world’s biggest solar-electric power station going to be located?
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• Great conversation at my Columbia University Population Biology Seminar talk
• “This is the Nature of Cities” podcast on urban bees and civic ecology
• “Science: A Candle in the Dark” podcast on Urban Ecology
• “In Defense of Plants” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the return of five-lined skinks
• Food is personal, sometimes ethical, but rarely political
• Would a “labor economy” lead to different outcomes than the “capital economy”?
• How the built environment influences our ability to sustain personal and environmental commitments
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• Crucial climate talks in Paris take place in a socially repressive environment
• Do we need to have a kinder, gentler one-child policy in Western industrial countries?
• Are technological optimists too optimistic about technological sustainability?
• Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
• China shifts a failed cultural policy designed to stabilize population
• Shark attacks are down, but you still have to make good decisions out there on the ocean
• Urbanization is not urbanization: density, not size, drives sustainability
• What open access evangelists often miss about the task at hand
• Without sustainability in our diets, we won’t be sustainable
• Should we compromise with nations that hunt whales?
• Anne-Marie Slaughter on the tradeoff between work and caregiving
• Formation of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution has the potential to catalyze research into how culture evolves
• Court Ruling in the Netherlands may point the way to cracking the climate compliance conundrum
• Is the threat of regulation enough to incentivize cooperation from nitrogen polluters?
• In the end, climate compromise comes down to writing and editing
• New article in Science provides a comprehensive overview and update on Yellowstone National Park
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• John Oliver holds first “balanced” climate debate on television
• Donald Trump saves CitiBike, proving that selfishness and cooperation are no longer opposed
• Why socially-progressive scientists should not make bets…
• Concentrated factory farming of livestock massively alters the phosphorus cycle
• Nice infographic on global and domestic food waste
• An amazing indictment of the academic publishing industry (in which most of us participate)
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Great NPR piece on how simple it would be for us to reduce carbon emissions
• Pratt Professor Ágnes Mócsy releases “Smashing Matters” short film
• Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
• “Earth Hour” seeks to re-focus our attention on all the earth provides
• Quantifying the climate value of that 40-acre woodlot
• Green port policies yield big decreases in the ecological footprint of shipping
• Dog license dataset opens up huge potential for understanding the dog-human mutualism
• Production on marginal lands can meet only 25% of our biofuel mandates
• NPR provides a quick overview of the human drive to reciprocate
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• Does American faith in genetic determinism limit the achievement of our students?
• Chronicle of Higher Education feature explores the question of why more women do not succeed in science
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• Rogue iron fertilization? Things have gotten weird!
• Rob Nixon on Rachel Carson’s prescience
• Barry Commoner, pioneering scientist and environmentalist, is dead at 95
• Some conservatives actually see the public health and economic dilemmas posed by greenhouse gas emissions
• Climate and Clean Air Coalition unites air pollution concerns
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• Rachel Carson still under attack for bringing her values to bear on her science
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• North American federal governments seek to defund environmental and ecological science
• Leaving with empty hands, should Rio+20 participants nonetheless leave with a sense of optimism?
• Evolution may be too slow: British Columbia begins assisted migration of forests
• Should conservation scientists also be advocates for particular policies?
• Is this what free-market conservation looks like?
• North Carolina legislators enact strict law limiting the rate of natural change
• Science Magazine outlines the big scientific issues at Rio+20
• Joseph E. Stiglitz discusses the economically destabilizing impact of rent-seeking
• Economic Whales and their Parasites
• James K. Galbraith makes the connection between debt policy and social stability
• 2012 Sustainability Crash Course at Pratt Institute
• Is the European Union going rogue or playing altruist on airline emissions?
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• National Geographic “Can China go green?”
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• Using Ecological Footprints to Teach Sustainability
• Official video of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010
• Firefighting and the Tragedy of the Commons
• Asian Carp on NPR
• Steven Chillrud Visit to Pratt Institute
• ESA 2009 Meeting Day #2 (Monday)
• Changing and not changing the way we use our agricultural land

Publication (11)

• “Mount H-Index”: I never made it to base camp, and I have still had some great adventures
• Open Book Publishers, an alternative model to academic presses
• Pivot #1: My popular science book idea may not get picked up by a literary agent
• What open access evangelists often miss about the task at hand
• Returning (somewhat reluctantly) to Twitter
• Resources for writing a popular science book (and particularly a proposal)
• Open Access publishing and “peer review” fail the test of a well-designed hoax
• An amazing indictment of the academic publishing industry (in which most of us participate)
• Where to publish in ecology & evolution without funding for page charges
• E-print Network provides searchable access to the primary scientific literature
• On the Media takes on the problem of scientific integrity in scientific journals and the popular media

Punishment (28)

• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• Can understanding cooperation lead to higher-yield crops?
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• Have we outgrown the scale of cooperation supported by the Big Gods of Big Religion?
• Is the threat of regulation enough to incentivize cooperation from nitrogen polluters?
• E&E in A&D: The Armstrong Lie
• Model evidence that third party punishment only makes sense in tight-knit groups
• Zero determinant strategy is just another short-term adaptation
• Further evidence that Hamilton was wrong about eusocial insects
• Enforcing norms may be for personal gain, not to maintain social order (at least amongst Santa Barbara undergraduates)
• Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, cannot triangulate punishment
• What’s ironic is that the creationists do not realize that we evolutionists might be trying to understand their success
• Punishment, properly rewarded, can promote cooperation without corruption
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• If your loners are truly loners they won’t punish, and cooperation thrives even in the presence of antisocial punishment
• Larry Arnhart on Singer, Bowles, and Gintis and Darwinian libertarianism
• A new salvo in the punishment wars: if everyone can punish, defectors triumph
• Steven Pinker makes it clear that he is not a “group selectionist”
• Scientific American “Why We Help”
• Social Evolution Forum takes on role of social networking in human cooperation
• Why don’t other animals make better use of punishment?
• Is the European Union going rogue or playing altruist on airline emissions?
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• Howard Rheingold TED talk urges a global movement to study cooperation
• How the right wing co-opts research into the evolution of cooperation
• Rand and Nowak paper on antisocial punishment in public goods games
• Barash and Lipton on Bin Laden (and Us)
• Firefighting and the Tragedy of the Commons

Quantifying Costs and Benefits (6)

• That beard and deep voice may be to put him in his place, not attract her
• Explaining the evolutionary explanation for handedness
• Do cancer cells play cooperate in the Prisoner’s Dilemma?
• Is “nest parasitism” really “nest mutualism”?
• If sloths endure costs to maintain closed-loop agricultural systems, why can’t we?
• Slate article explores the big brain, big society connection

Quantitative Analysis (17)

• My ecological footprint for 2016-2017
• Biophotovoltaics: a promising design innovation, or a great example of lack of quantitative design?
• My ecological footprint for 2015-2016
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• I am honored to be visiting the Green Meadow Waldorf School as part of their week-long Sustainability workshop
• Is New York City a “sustainable” metropolis?
• My ecological footprint for 2014-2015
• Envirolutions brings bottle transformation to Green Week 2015
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• There’s No Such Thing as Qualitative Sustainability
• Interesting numbers on the sustainability (or lack thereof) of the aviation industry
• Do we need to delete to keep the web sustainable?
• Quantifying the climate value of that 40-acre woodlot
• Production on marginal lands can meet only 25% of our biofuel mandates
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• UCS “Cooler Smarter” footprint calculator promotes lower carbon behaviors
• 2012 Sustainability Crash Course at Pratt Institute
• Using Ecological Footprints to Teach Sustainability
• Reclaiming a Rigorous Definition of “Sustainability”
• Crade-to-Cradle
• Quantitative Sustainability and the practice of Life Cycle Analysis

Radio & Podcasts (90)

Reciprocity (37)

• STEAMplant project brings local primary school kids to Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden
• America Society of Primatologists condemns H. A. and Margret Rey, calls for Curious George boycott
• Dan Ariely’s “Arming the Donkeys” podcast
• Clever study shows how cooperative bacteria sanction — and therefore exclude — cheaters
• Can understanding cooperation lead to higher-yield crops?
• How stupid professorial attitudes towards Wikipedia are making students less savvy
• E&E in A&D: The Armstrong Lie
• Do humans form genetically similar social groups independent of kinship?
• Cath Dennis publishes non-computerized classroom adaptation of Axelrod’s iPD Tournament
• New research suggests that chimpanzees understand that cooperation produces benefits
• An anecdote that illustrates the tremendous power of human network reciprocity
• A tour of your diverse microbiome, and the things that might deplete that diversity
• My review of “Origins of Altruism and Cooperation” is published in QRB
• Cooperative child-rearing pays dividends for ruffed lemurs, irrespective of kinship
• National Geographic “The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion”
• Zero determinant strategy is just another short-term adaptation
• A spatial version of the Traveler’s Dilemma allows cooperation to persist
• Just in case you missed it the first ten times: E.O. Wilson likes group selection, Jerry Coyne does not
• Understanding kin selection and reciprocity when strategies are culturally propagated
• Freeman Dyson wins the contest, and then says the contest is stupid
• NPR provides a quick overview of the human drive to reciprocate
• Enforcing norms may be for personal gain, not to maintain social order (at least amongst Santa Barbara undergraduates)
• Despite great press for Dyson, the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is still not the solution to human cooperation
• Larry Arnhart on Singer, Bowles, and Gintis and Darwinian libertarianism
• Familiarity breeds… mutual aid (at least in some birds)
• Scientific American “Why We Help”
• PNAS paper explores the role of population structure in facilitating reciprocity
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• Howard Rheingold TED talk urges a global movement to study cooperation
• Costly signalling not so costly in the presence of comrades
• How the right wing co-opts research into the evolution of cooperation
• Is humanity’s most dangerous technology debt?
• Martin Nowak lecture on The Evolution of Cooperation at MIT
• Easy-IPD version 1.0 released!
• “A Paradise Built in Hell” by Rebecca Solnit
• Computer-Based Tools for Teaching about Robert Axelrod’s Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod

Religion (29)

• Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson liberated after month-long kidnapping ordeal
• What do we know about Cultural Transmission?
• My personal experience that creationists gravitate to anything with even the faintest scent of scientific uncertainty (and what to do about it)
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• Jonathan Haidt on the business advantage of being ethical
• Formation of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution has the potential to catalyze research into how culture evolves
• Have we outgrown the scale of cooperation supported by the Big Gods of Big Religion?
• WmD Episode #00002 has been released
• The forces of cultural evolution push hard on political humor
• Evolution 2014: Want to teach both sides? Have your students deconstruct creationist propaganda!
• Evolution 2014: A clever way to see if creationist students understand evolutionary concepts
• String Theory: should we care?
• Was Teilhard de Chardin the real inventor of an evolutionary approach to culture?
• Can you replicate the collective adaptive value of religion without god?
• Sarah Coakley on the connection between theology and evolutionary theory
• Martin Nowak to lecture on the compatibility of god and the evolutionary process
• Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• Michael Ruse on James Lovelock’s Gaia of 2012
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• Can neuroeconomics help economics become a real science?
• What’s ironic is that the creationists do not realize that we evolutionists might be trying to understand their success
• “School of Life” acknowledges the values in religion worth preserving
• Great Michael Ruse piece on the politics of resisting religious encroachment on evolutionary biology
• Understanding the role of the Templeton Foundation in funding evolutionary biology research
• David Sloan Wilson differentiates “Evolutionary Religious Studies” from “The New Atheism”
• Can environmentalists and the religious faithful work together to preserve creation?
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• Naturalistic Fallacy: 1, Sam Harris: 0
• Make Every Day Darwin Day, Minus the Darwin
• Greg Graffin on The Takeaway
• NPR is all up in evolution
• Darwin’s Cathedral versus The God Delusion
• Common Ground Symposium at Columbia University

Reproductive Fitness (16)

• Moral Sense III approaches, June 2nd at St. Francis College
• I am honored to be part of Moral Sense III
• My article on adolescence featured in the This View of Life culture series
• You can check out my first Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk (at St. Francis College) on YouTube
• Great conversation at my Columbia University Population Biology Seminar talk
• Is there a trade-off between reproduction and creativity?
• My first “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators” talk: next Friday at St. Francis College
• Polygyny: the culture we dislike might not be the culture that is evolutionarily disfavored
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• The often-large difference between “breeding” and “parenting”
• When it comes to sex, we are consumately proximate
• The most fundamental way in which culture pushes against biology
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Barash the gene accountant on that little economic driver called “reproduction”
• Cooperative child-rearing pays dividends for ruffed lemurs, irrespective of kinship
• Barash not so enlightening on the paradox of human homosexuality

Reptiles (2)

• Urban Wildlife Podcast on synanthropes and urban island castaways
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on big animals in big cities

Reputation (14)

• Arming the Donkeys on kids, parenting, and Burning Man
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• That beard and deep voice may be to put him in his place, not attract her
• Asymmetrical interaction best explained by superrational rather than rational strategy
• Have we outgrown the scale of cooperation supported by the Big Gods of Big Religion?
• Is the threat of regulation enough to incentivize cooperation from nitrogen polluters?
• How stupid professorial attitudes towards Wikipedia are making students less savvy
• E&E in A&D: The Armstrong Lie
• The forces of cultural evolution push hard on political humor
• Model evidence that third party punishment only makes sense in tight-knit groups
• The benefits of a maintaining a relatively small in-group
• NPR provides a quick overview of the human drive to reciprocate
• Enforcing norms may be for personal gain, not to maintain social order (at least amongst Santa Barbara undergraduates)
• Can proper education allow reputation to foster action on climate change?

Research Projects (3)

• The first product of a three-year-long Faculty Learning Community project
• I will be a 2019-2020 Center for Teaching & Learning Fellow
• How does this professor really spend his work time? (Spring 2019)
• How does this professor really spend his work time? (Fall 2018)
• I am honored to be part of Moral Sense III
• You can check out my first Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk (at St. Francis College) on YouTube
• Great conversation at my Columbia University Population Biology Seminar talk
• My next Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk: Columbia University on March 7th, 2016
• What do we know about Cultural Transmission?
• Is there a trade-off between reproduction and creativity?
• Personalized DNA tests likely to provide further evidence of human inter-connectedness
• It was an honor to talk to St. Francis College!
• My first “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators” talk: next Friday at St. Francis College
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• How much impact can a set of free game theory infographics have?
• Do we need to have a kinder, gentler one-child policy in Western industrial countries?
• Jeremy Yoder on contemporary selection for increased human height
• Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
• Polygyny: the culture we dislike might not be the culture that is evolutionarily disfavored
• China shifts a failed cultural policy designed to stabilize population
• Open Book Publishers, an alternative model to academic presses
• Pivot #1: My popular science book idea may not get picked up by a literary agent
• Yeah, you can find me on Facebook and Google Plus now
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• Is technological evolution “de-agglomerating” cultural innovation?
• The often-large difference between “breeding” and “parenting”
• Anne-Marie Slaughter on the tradeoff between work and caregiving
• When it comes to sex, we are consumately proximate
• Our culture is special, but not especially uncommon
• The most fundamental way in which culture pushes against biology
• Returning (somewhat reluctantly) to Twitter
• Resources for writing a popular science book (and particularly a proposal)
• WmD Episode #00003 has been released
• WmD Episode #00002 has been released
• A niche with the masses?
• WmD Episode #00001 has been released!
• Sabbatical, Sweet Sabbatical
• The Big Questions in Ecology and Evolution
• The WmD Project has a logo
• My Evolution 2014 talk is on YouTube
• Open Information Environments and the 21st Century College Classroom
• I receive funding to initiate the WmD Project
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• Was Teilhard de Chardin the real inventor of an evolutionary approach to culture?
• How will I deliver conceptual understanding?
• Embarking on a grand experiment in conceptual teaching
• Working on a VUE concept map of the fieldTest simulation
• “The Sustainable Use of Fisheries” now a part of the EcoEd Digital Library
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project launches with its first release of graphic packages
• Short interview with Mark Pagel in The Guardian
• Olivia Judson reviews Mark Pagel’s “Wired for Culture”
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: Ultimatum Game “conceptual” images
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First “sequence” images
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: New “conceptual” images
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First “examples” matrices
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First images
• Short movie showing features of Easy-IPD
• Easy-IPD version 1.0 released!
• Computer-Based Tools for Teaching about Robert Axelrod’s Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments

Resilience (8)

• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• 2016 Sustainability Summit live on Pratt’s Video Site
• Julia Buntaine explores the potential power of art and science collaborations
• So much for the big-brained city bird theory?
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
• “Adaptive” approach to climate change puts faith in resilience thinking
• Evolution may be too slow: British Columbia begins assisted migration of forests

Resistance Evolution in Parasites (8)

• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2017)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2016)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2016)
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• New report on drug resistance highlights the tragedy of our antibiotics commons
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• Caterpillars weaponize nicotine
• Rachel Carson still under attack for bringing her values to bear on her science

Resource Consumption (41)

• An inspiring summit, but big challenges at home and afar…
• My ecological footprint for 2015-2016
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• What’s the meaning of professorial fashion?
• Food is personal, sometimes ethical, but rarely political
• Is New York City a “sustainable” metropolis?
• Are technological optimists too optimistic about technological sustainability?
• Does the rapid spread of a culture of over-exploitation intensify our impact on wild food sources?
• Cargo ships a major source of NOx emissions
• Why the “just burn it all” approach to ending fossil fuel dependence does not work
• Urbanization is not urbanization: density, not size, drives sustainability
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• My ecological footprint for 2014-2015
• Envirolutions brings bottle transformation to Green Week 2015
• Water, Alfalfa, China, and a modern Tragedy of the Commons
• This site is now hosted by A Small Orange
• Choosing a more sustainable web host
• Pledge, Petition, Protect! All at Green Week 2014!
• Interesting numbers on the sustainability (or lack thereof) of the aviation industry
• TurnUp seeks to turn excess art materials into treasure, not trash
• Why socially-progressive scientists should not make bets…
• Nice infographic on global and domestic food waste
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Great NPR piece on how simple it would be for us to reduce carbon emissions
• Envirolutions asks the Pratt community to identify where there is “room for improvement”
• Charlotte Douglas International Airport employs worms to close the loop on airport waste
• Fracking study retracted after the discovery of a massive conflict of interest
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• Pratt Envirolutions Students Bring Recycling Bins to Campus
• Envirolutions students release Trash Tetris video to promote recycling bin launch
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Would you like a few red-listed species with that shrimp cocktail sir?
• Green Week events celebrate cycling and recycling
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• National Geographic “Can China go green?”
• Pratt Envirolutions trumpets green initiatives during Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Pratt Envirolutions leads campaign for reusable containers
• Crade-to-Cradle

Reviews (10)

• How will the COVID-19 crisis affect action on climate change?
• I will be participating in the 2019 NCEP Teaching & Learning Studio
• A cool (new-ish) IPD game theory simulator!
• Humans arrive, other mammals shrink
• What might we discover in the ocean twilight zone?
• Can a realistically-parameterized model tell us why our brains are so big?
• Alan Rabinowitz, 1953-2018
• My entry on the evolution of play will be added to the massive Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science
• PBS’ Deep Look on Firefly communication and deception
• Deep Look on nutrient transport by salmon
• “Mount H-Index”: I never made it to base camp, and I have still had some great adventures
• Who was the first to catalog color? Hint: it wasn’t designers!
• Fantastic piece on nature/nurture by Patrick F. Clarkin in TVOL
• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• My review of new edited Trophic Ecology book out in the Quarterly Review of Biology
• Pratt News features short piece on Dr. Roland Kays’s campus visit
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Hedgehogs, Raccoons, and Urbanite Biophilia
• NPR features Christopher Boehm on the love-hate relationship we have people in power
• Another great Skeptoid episode, this one on race
• Skeptoid podcast on Colony Collapse Disorder
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• 2016 Sustainability Summit live on Pratt’s Video Site
• Julia Buntaine explores the potential power of art and science collaborations
• Want to know where NYC’s water supply stands? There’s a DEP page for that!
• Maybe human impacts aren’t so dramatic (when experienced from the geologic time scale)
• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• An inspiring summit, but big challenges at home and afar…
• Arming the Donkeys on kids, parenting, and Burning Man
• My article on adolescence featured in the This View of Life culture series
• Pratt students make the potential trip to Mars better designed
• Biophotovoltaics: a promising design innovation, or a great example of lack of quantitative design?
• Pratt Foundation teams up with Brooklyn College pyschologists to study perception and drawing
• You can check out my first Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk (at St. Francis College) on YouTube
• What can be made by mimicking biological “assemblies”?
• Like to forage for mushrooms? Beware the Amanita!
• “This is the Nature of Cities” podcast on urban bees and civic ecology
• “Science: A Candle in the Dark” podcast on Urban Ecology
• “In Defense of Plants” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Dan Ariely’s “Arming the Donkeys” podcast
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the return of five-lined skinks
• What do we know about Cultural Transmission?
• An eye is not an eye is not an eye
• Food is personal, sometimes ethical, but rarely political
• How do we know when people are actually happy?
• Is New York City a “sustainable” metropolis?
• Understanding [culture + multilevel selection] = potential for Sustainability
• Injury intuition confirmation bias? Farce article goes really viral
• Would a “labor economy” lead to different outcomes than the “capital economy”?
• Clever study shows how cooperative bacteria sanction — and therefore exclude — cheaters
• Can understanding cooperation lead to higher-yield crops?
• How the built environment influences our ability to sustain personal and environmental commitments
• Personalized DNA tests likely to provide further evidence of human inter-connectedness
• My personal experience that creationists gravitate to anything with even the faintest scent of scientific uncertainty (and what to do about it)
• Lev Ginzburg Fest: celebration of a “retirement”
• What deficiencies in sound perception reveal about how we perceive sound
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• To be an effective critical theorist of science, it helps to understand science
• Are technological optimists too optimistic about technological sustainability?
• Primates — but not their rodent relatives — can infer the effects of other individuals on resource availability
• Higher education teaching loads are about economics, not valuing teaching
• Jeremy Yoder on contemporary selection for increased human height
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• Maybe infants don’t really care who helps and who hinders after all…
• The problem with same sex attraction “for the good of the species”
• Fascinating and clever study of how personal contact norms vary by relationship
• Jonathan Haidt on the business advantage of being ethical
• That beard and deep voice may be to put him in his place, not attract her
• Review of William B. Provine’s “The ‘Random Genetic Drift’ Fallacy”
• Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
• China shifts a failed cultural policy designed to stabilize population
• Major masts made by multiplicative modification
• Group phenotypic composition: implications for individuals and their groups
• Does the rapid spread of a culture of over-exploitation intensify our impact on wild food sources?
• Are parasites really ecologically necessary?
• Shark attacks are down, but you still have to make good decisions out there on the ocean
• While we vacuum the seas, we may as well clean them of debris…
• Cargo ships a major source of NOx emissions
• Why the “just burn it all” approach to ending fossil fuel dependence does not work
• Mist net photographs as art?
• Charismatic megafauna offer protection to their less appealing heterospecifics
• Urbanization is not urbanization: density, not size, drives sustainability
• David Sloan Wilson on how Jeff Bezos don’t know squat about chickens (or evolution!)
• Does Bayesian bias aid us in making adaptive distorted self-assessments?
• W.W. Norton’s new InQuizitive partner to the Bergstrom and Dugatkin Evolution textbook
• Malcolm Gladwell on the social contagion of mass shootings
• What open access evangelists often miss about the task at hand
• Without sustainability in our diets, we won’t be sustainable
• Is technological evolution “de-agglomerating” cultural innovation?
• ECOmotion Studios on Huffaker’s crazy experiments to make prey and predators coexist
• ECOmotion Studios on Simberloff & Wilson’s island biogeography experiments
• ECOmotion Studios on Hairston Smith Slobodkin and why the earth is green
• EcoMotion studios celebrates Robert Paine’s Pisaster experiments
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on synanthropes and urban island castaways
• Like-with-like assortment plus exponential fitness increases cooperation, even under weak selection
• Should we compromise with nations that hunt whales?
• My testimonial for Gregory Tague’s “Evolution and Human Culture”
• The often-large difference between “breeding” and “parenting”
• Anne-Marie Slaughter on the tradeoff between work and caregiving
• New report on drug resistance highlights the tragedy of our antibiotics commons
• Open Tree of Life allows experts and novices alike to explore “the” phylogeny
• Do creative people have “messy minds”?
• Does the ability to accumulate wealth make us value the future more?
• Are big corporate polluters trying to “artwash” their image?
• When it comes to sex, we are consumately proximate
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• Asymmetrical interaction best explained by superrational rather than rational strategy
• Our culture is special, but not especially uncommon
• Can good design make highways less of a problem?
• Have we outgrown the scale of cooperation supported by the Big Gods of Big Religion?
• The most fundamental way in which culture pushes against biology
• Rule number one of cooperative bacterial warfare? Be in the majority.
• Music, the cortisone balm?
• Should altruism have an effect on your final exam score?
• Carrying capacity — but not growth rate — varies with habitat quality (at least for moose)
• Go mutualistic or go home?
• Explaining the evolutionary explanation for handedness
• WmD Episode #00002 has been released
• So much for the big-brained city bird theory?
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on big animals in big cities
• Rivers, Lakes, Seas, and Environmental Justice
• Evolution beyond adaptation: a critical step for evolutionary theory
• Court Ruling in the Netherlands may point the way to cracking the climate compliance conundrum
• Zoonosis, Ebola, and the Elusive Reservoir Host
• A niche with the masses?
• Can we resolve the ‘group selection debate’ by focusing on human cooperation?
• In the end, climate compromise comes down to writing and editing
• New article in Science provides a comprehensive overview and update on Yellowstone National Park
• On the verge of 400 ppm Carbon Dioxide: a symbolic threshold
• PCB Bioaccumulation and Polar Bear Penises
• E&E in A&D: Genetic profiling as art?
• Our paper on a super-rational solution to the tragedy of the commons published in Scientific Reports
• My review of the “Encyclopedia of Theoretical Ecology” published in QRB
• Review of What We Made by Tom Finkelpearl
• Water, Alfalfa, China, and a modern Tragedy of the Commons
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• Ben Knight’s “Phyletic gradualism / Punctuated equilibrium”
• A nice synopsis of some reasons for laughter
• Choosing a more sustainable web host
• Do humans form genetically similar social groups independent of kinship?
• Do cancer cells play cooperate in the Prisoner’s Dilemma?
• My Evolution 2014 talk is on YouTube
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Hawaiian crickets converge on the same solution to eavesdropping parasites
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• John Oliver holds first “balanced” climate debate on television
• Cath Dennis publishes non-computerized classroom adaptation of Axelrod’s iPD Tournament
• Our review paper on Late Pleistocene Extinction Modeling published in QRB!
• Apparently I should stop holding my breath for the Google Translate “dolphin” module
• Is “nest parasitism” really “nest mutualism”?
• 0.5% to 3%: Do we now have a better sense of what makes people smart?
• David Haig suggests that babies cry at night to prevent siblings
• Donald Trump saves CitiBike, proving that selfishness and cooperation are no longer opposed
• Cognitive Ethology and Cat Companionship
• Interesting numbers on the sustainability (or lack thereof) of the aviation industry
• If sloths endure costs to maintain closed-loop agricultural systems, why can’t we?
• Do we need to delete to keep the web sustainable?
• String Theory: should we care?
• Okay, I admit it: I am a bit of a Neanderthal
• Model evidence that third party punishment only makes sense in tight-knit groups
• How understanding social evolution might help treat cancer
• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• Was Teilhard de Chardin the real inventor of an evolutionary approach to culture?
• Understanding the cascading effect of carnivore loss… before we lose all the carnivores
• Why socially-progressive scientists should not make bets…
• Cod gone on Cape Cod
• Concentrated factory farming of livestock massively alters the phosphorus cycle
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• In bird reproduction, parasitism and cooperation coevolve
• Curiosity and culturomics
• Are MOOCs just the clunky starting place for a more evolved form of new teaching?
• CNN tackles climate change by explaining public goods games!
• Now legal, Northern California’s pot farms join the rest of agriculture in impacting water supply
• Money Talking about Janet Yellen and multilevel selection
• Nice infographic on global and domestic food waste
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• Can you replicate the collective adaptive value of religion without god?
• Would a different term make us better appreciate ecosystem services?
• Caterpillars weaponize nicotine
• Taking risks for the data
• “Brainchildren” — another way to conceptualize our devotion to cultural fitness
• Are MOOCs and the arts incompatible?
• Barash the gene accountant on that little economic driver called “reproduction”
• Does self organization of social networks foster cooperation in the face of cheating?
• New research suggests that chimpanzees understand that cooperation produces benefits
• Microbes may surf their way to successful cooperation
• Open Access publishing and “peer review” fail the test of a well-designed hoax
• An amazing indictment of the academic publishing industry (in which most of us participate)
• Should we emulate the cooperative and conservative habits of the sloth?
• Recognizing the difference between what the big and small educational institutions offer
• An anecdote that illustrates the tremendous power of human network reciprocity
• Additional evidence that obesity may be due to environment, not just habits
• A tour of your diverse microbiome, and the things that might deplete that diversity
• With all we know, we still know too little to reliably re-engineer ecosystems
• More press for paper that de-bunks the zero determinant superiority
• My review of “Origins of Altruism and Cooperation” is published in QRB
• New evidence of whooping crane culture on the rebound
• Cooperative child-rearing pays dividends for ruffed lemurs, irrespective of kinship
• National Geographic “The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion”
• Think the Milgram Experiments tell us something definitive about human nature? Think again!
• Sarah Coakley on the connection between theology and evolutionary theory
• Zero determinant strategy is just another short-term adaptation
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Mammal monogamy still a mystery, but maybe more than a numbers game
• Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno
• Isabella Rossellini tackles motherhood without human pretense
• New theory explaining the prevalence of homosexuality focuses on epigenetics
• Ever wonder about the swimming pattern of sperm?
• The potential for human evolution has increased along with the population size of our species
• Great NPR piece on how simple it would be for us to reduce carbon emissions
• The benefits of a maintaining a relatively small in-group
• Pratt Professor Ágnes Mócsy releases “Smashing Matters” short film
• NPR piece suggests that economics are pushing us towards nutrient recycling
• My review of Railsback and Grimm’s “Agent-based and individual-based modeling” textbook published in Ecology
• Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
• Seth Horowitz on our perception of sound
• Quantifying the climate value of that 40-acre woodlot
• Up-Goer Five text editor challenges you to make accessible explanations
• Green port policies yield big decreases in the ecological footprint of shipping
• As the nature of university-level teaching changes, should we re-assess the credit hour?
• Dog license dataset opens up huge potential for understanding the dog-human mutualism
• Brief NYT article on empathy in children
• Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
• Production on marginal lands can meet only 25% of our biofuel mandates
• Roberts Publishing releases an iPad version of their majors Evolution textbook
• Montreal art installation rewards cooperative play with musical novelty
• If your “free will” is questionable, feel free to exercise your “free won’t”
• Do our brains require endurance activity in order to function?
• Barash not so enlightening on the paradox of human homosexuality
• Multiple Intelligences theory gets some neuroscientific support
• Charlotte Douglas International Airport employs worms to close the loop on airport waste
• Freeman Dyson wins the contest, and then says the contest is stupid
• Fracking study retracted after the discovery of a massive conflict of interest
• G. Kim Blank on making writing work better by eliminating the term paper
• NPR provides a quick overview of the human drive to reciprocate
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• New evidence that economic cooperation existed between Vikings and Inuit
• National Geographic feature on penguin propulsion
• Does American faith in genetic determinism limit the achievement of our students?
• Further evidence that Hamilton was wrong about eusocial insects
• Making the formation of social networks more realistic also makes them more cooperative
• Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
• Slate article explores the big brain, big society connection
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• Chronicle of Higher Education feature explores the question of why more women do not succeed in science
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• Michael Ruse on James Lovelock’s Gaia of 2012
• Ready for eugenics 2.0?
• International Symposium honors the work of Lynn Margulis
• On becoming a psychopath
• Rogue iron fertilization? Things have gotten weird!
• Freeman Dyson calls the Prisoner’s Dilemma “an amusing toy”
• New PNAS special issue explores the developmental effects of early social environment
• Rob Nixon on Rachel Carson’s prescience
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• Barry Commoner, pioneering scientist and environmentalist, is dead at 95
• Enforcing norms may be for personal gain, not to maintain social order (at least amongst Santa Barbara undergraduates)
• Think that the DNA transfer is only from parents to offspring? Think again!
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• Some conservatives actually see the public health and economic dilemmas posed by greenhouse gas emissions
• Can proper education allow reputation to foster action on climate change?
• Lack of complete transparency presents an obstacle but not a block to cooperation
• Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, cannot triangulate punishment
• What’s ironic is that the creationists do not realize that we evolutionists might be trying to understand their success
• Agent-based modeling instead of game theory: I agree!
• Punishment, properly rewarded, can promote cooperation without corruption
• Want a good gauge of how much humans pollute waterways? Just measure for caffeine!
• The humble Mistletoe turns out to be a probable keystone species
• Climate and Clean Air Coalition unites air pollution concerns
• Reductions in fertilizer use are now worth carbon credits
• Does anthropogenic change make natives into invaders?
• Are the Sentinelese the last untouched hunter-gatherer culture?
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• Despite great press for Dyson, the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is still not the solution to human cooperation
• Rachel Carson still under attack for bringing her values to bear on her science
• Rebranding global warming as a health threat
• Bacterial societies defy selfish gene predictions
• “School of Life” acknowledges the values in religion worth preserving
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• Would online data repositories solve the problem of scientific fraud?
• My review of “How Species Interact” published in Ecological Modelling
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• ESA 2012 Workshop #8, Getting off the Ground with Individual-Based Modeling: A Primer for Instructors and Researchers
• Preview of the 2012 Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon
• If your loners are truly loners they won’t punish, and cooperation thrives even in the presence of antisocial punishment
• Perhaps nestedness is just an artifact of ecological opportunity (and not stability)
• Call it “ethnocentrism” or the “green beard effect”, “tags” assist cooperation
• Sometimes our simulations have more to tell than we first see
• A final solution to the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma?
• Robert Krulwich on the value of telling stories about science
• On Being features David Sloan Wilson
• Daniel Dennett on Darwin and Turing’s “strange inversion of reasoning”
• Evolution may be too slow: British Columbia begins assisted migration of forests
• National Geographic’s “If They Could Only Talk” considers Easter Island’s many mysteries
• Peter Turchin on Steven Pinker’s “Grand Deception” hypotheses
• Steven Pinker makes it clear that he is not a “group selectionist”
• Are the population dynamics of Dupont’s lark dictated by multilevel selective pressures?
• Once again Jerry Coyne goes ad hominem to defend evolutionary orthodoxy
• Tim Birkenhead on anthropomorphism and animal emotion
• David Barash illuminates the “EvoPolitics” of Darwin’s time
• Great Michael Ruse piece on the politics of resisting religious encroachment on evolutionary biology
• Ted Kaczynski as a scholar of resistance to technology
• Understanding the role of the Templeton Foundation in funding evolutionary biology research
• Preschoolers cooperatively rock chimps in puzzle tournament
• Prominent evolutionary biologists weigh in on whether humans can evolve into a ‘superorganism’
• Is this what free-market conservation looks like?
• Mutualistic fungus transfers nitrogen from parasitized insects to its plant host
• North Carolina legislators enact strict law limiting the rate of natural change
• Gerald Carter produces an informative video on cooperation in vampire bats
• Familiarity breeds… mutual aid (at least in some birds)
• Interesting reports from the Consilience Conference
• Do you need cooperation in your model to explain why there are more right-handed people?
• Scientific American “Why We Help”
• There is no doubt that there are conservation trade-offs associated with the proliferation of wind power
• Is a comic movie about getting a Ph.D. revealing of some scientific tragedies?
• Self-castration sometimes turns out to be good for reproductive success
• Kandyan dwarf toad removes itself from the IUCN Red List
• Longer telomeres imparted by older fathers may forestall senescence
• Brian Czech warns ecologists against drinking the “sustainable growth Koolaid”
• Honey bees harbor a remarkably diverse community of mutualistic gut microbes
• Lyme disease extensification may have more to do with foxes than deer
• Peacocks communicate via the (ultra)sounds they make with their feathers
• Is Alzheimer’s disease caused by prion proliferation?
• PBS short profiles Pratt Institute
• “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” exhibit at the American Museum on Natural History
• Our brains are too smart to be tricked: diet sodas just make your body crave more calories
• In case you were a skeptic: bears can count
• Surprisingly, rugby can be used to understand honest signaling
• Aquatic food chains have gotten longer and less diverse over evolutionary time
• Mesocosm experiment considers the effects of human modification of community structure
• New study on birds uses remote tracking to provide detailed behavioral data
• Big felines have lots of commensal fans
• A comparison of behaviorally-based animal diseases reminds us of the kingdom in which we belong
• New comprehensive data synthesis favors a pluralistic explanation for Eurasian mammoth extinction
• The Australian Government blocks coal mine to protect the Great Barrier Reef
• Now if you could only keep your cytosine methylated you might live forever
• Bonobo sequence establishes that humans are equally but dissimilarly related to our chimpanzee relatives
• Can “muppet theory” help explain behavioral heterogeneity in human social groups?
• Vampire bats: the ideal organism for studying cooperation?
• NY Times provides perspective on E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• PNAS paper explores the role of population structure in facilitating reciprocity
• Richard Dawkins on E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• David Sloan Wilson on Richard Dawkins on E.O. Wilson
• Does climate change have the potential to reduce the stabilizing effects of biodiversity?
• On the Media takes on the problem of scientific integrity in scientific journals and the popular media
• Don’t mistake having a better map for knowing where you are: new technology for sequencing fetal DNA will not lead to serious trait selection
• Joseph E. Stiglitz discusses the economically destabilizing impact of rent-seeking
• Understanding the effects of asymmetry and relatedness on social volunteerism
• There are plenty of organs out there: more altruism would end the social dilemma of who gets available organs
• Economic Whales and their Parasites
• Larry Arnhart reviews E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• Are the most lucrative components of the financial sector parasites on the larger economy?
• How fast do anthropogenic impacts get amplified up the food chain? Ask a bluefin!
• {Canis lupus familiaris + Homo sapiens} versus Homo neanderthalenthis?
• Is the origin of all life the gyre?
• S.E. Gould takes on sloppy use of the selfish gene metaphor
• UCS “Cooler Smarter” footprint calculator promotes lower carbon behaviors
• Paulinella chromatophora’s photosynthetic engine blurs the line between endosymbiont and organelle
• Why don’t other animals make better use of punishment?
• An argument for better Frankensteins (and thus more prudent use of technology)
• Can cod come back?
• I knew that dog was watching me: Jennifer Verdolin confirms my worst fears
• If you don’t think that culture can make us do maladaptive things, check out “trepanning”
• Richard Sennett’s “Together” explores the history of cooperative rituals
• Is the sustainability movement too eco-centric?
• John Horgan reviews Robert Trivers’ “The Folly of Fools”
• James K. Galbraith makes the connection between debt policy and social stability
• BBC covers the up side of the North Pacific plastic “garbage patch”
• Olivia Judson reviews Mark Pagel’s “Wired for Culture”
• NPR drops dumb Bell Curve segment
• What kind of in-group does Facebook represent?
• Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild”
• Is the European Union going rogue or playing altruist on airline emissions?
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• Howard Rheingold TED talk urges a global movement to study cooperation
• Science in Art & Design: Justin Taylor’s “The Gospel of Anarchy”
• Costly signalling not so costly in the presence of comrades
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Naturalistic Fallacy: 1, Sam Harris: 0
• Online tools for teaching the basics of population growth
• A fabulous article on the collective efforts that created the World Wide Web and the corporate efforts to destroy it
• How the right wing co-opts research into the evolution of cooperation
• Rand and Nowak paper on antisocial punishment in public goods games
• Martin Nowak lecture on The Evolution of Cooperation at MIT
• What can Dean Potter teach us about evolution?
• Epigenetics on Leonard Lopate
• Aquaculture on Leonard Lopate
• Mexican Culture and Collective Action
• Economics and Human Satisfaction
• National Geographic “Can China go green?”
• “DNA” by James D. Watson
• Barash and Lipton on Bin Laden (and Us)
• NY Times way behind the times on Nature versus Nurture
• Being Clean Might Make You Allergic
• Sex and Slime on Fresh Air
• “A Paradise Built in Hell” by Rebecca Solnit
• Contemporary Human Cooperation With Non-Kin Probably No Mistake
• Computer-Based Tools for Teaching about Robert Axelrod’s Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• In the Light of Evolution V: Cooperation (January 7th)
• Saving Puffins, One Clip at a Time
• Mirsky on Poop in Space
• Using Ecological Footprints to Teach Sustainability
• Reclaiming a Rigorous Definition of “Sustainability”
• Are Eco-labels an Effective Tool for Conservation?
• Official video of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010
• Delayed Development and Human Evolution
• Greg Graffin on The Takeaway
• National Geographic’s “Science of Dogs”
• 2010 Convention on Biological Diversity and Ecosystem Services (Sorta)
• Robert Trivers and colleagues on Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson’s “The evolution of eusociality”
• Firefighting and the Tragedy of the Commons
• Asian Carp on NPR
• The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution
• National Geographic “Wolf Wars”
• The Cove
• NPR is all up in evolution
• Darwin’s Cathedral versus The God Delusion
• The Quest for the Perfect Hive
• Consilience
• Understanding biome-level response to climate change
• National Geographic “Fatal Attraction”
• Crade-to-Cradle
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – “Big Models” Special Session
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday): Afternoon sessions
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – Mutualistic Networks Symposium
• ESA 2009 Day #1 (Sunday)

Risk & Uncertainty (7)

Rivers & Streams (8)

School of Liberal Arts and Sciences (6)

• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• I will participate in a roundtable discussion on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
• For the next eight months, the future of my career is (mostly) out of my hands
• Recognizing the difference between what the big and small educational institutions offer
• Pratt Institute opens search for new full-time faculty member in the Math and Science Department
• Science in Art & Design: Justin Taylor’s “The Gospel of Anarchy”

Science (General) (9)

• STEAMplant project brings local primary school kids to Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden
• The first product of a three-year-long Faculty Learning Community project
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2019)
• My interview with Ardis DeFreece has been published in SciArt Magazine
• SSE tells HHS to acknowledge sex and gender diversity
• Can mathematics save us from partisan Gerrymandering?
• YES, microplastics end up in our guts. Now the question is from where? And to what effect?
• How renewable power sources grow more trees
• Scientific American drops special issue on “Science of Being Human”
• Don’t blame people for being obese (blame their neighborhood)
• Are corals riding ocean currents to exert climate change dominance over macroalgae?
• What might we discover in the ocean twilight zone?
• Can a realistically-parameterized model tell us why our brains are so big?
• My entry on the evolution of play will be added to the massive Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science
• I will present my EnviroAtlas class activities at NCSE 2018
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2017)
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Pratt Math & Science Department conducts search for new Chairperson
• “Mount H-Index”: I never made it to base camp, and I have still had some great adventures
• Who was the first to catalog color? Hint: it wasn’t designers!
• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• Urban Transect Walks: helping your students see the overlap between ecological and social patterns
• Hey, ho, Portland Oregon ESA 2017, let’s go!
• Moral Sense III approaches, June 2nd at St. Francis College
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2017)
• Pratt News features short piece on Dr. Roland Kays’s campus visit
• Support the mighty Bombardier Beetle’s quest to have its genome sequenced!
• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Like boats & science?… this might be the artist’s residency for you!
• Skeptoid podcast on Colony Collapse Disorder
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2016)
• 2016 Sustainability Summit live on Pratt’s Video Site
• Julia Buntaine explores the potential power of art and science collaborations
• Concerned about NYC’s air quality? Here’s a quick page to check…
• Maybe human impacts aren’t so dramatic (when experienced from the geologic time scale)
• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• An inspiring summit, but big challenges at home and afar…
• Sustainability Summit at Pratt Institute featuring Josh Fox
• Arming the Donkeys on kids, parenting, and Burning Man
• My article on adolescence featured in the This View of Life culture series
• A Tribute to Dr. David Becker on the Occasion of his Retirement
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2016)
• FDA investigators raid American Society of Human Genetics offices in Carl Zimmer cloning case
• Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson liberated after month-long kidnapping ordeal
• America Society of Primatologists condemns H. A. and Margret Rey, calls for Curious George boycott
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• Great conversation at my Columbia University Population Biology Seminar talk
• Art in the Lab hosts Brain Awareness Week event on March 16th, 2016
• I am honored to be visiting the Green Meadow Waldorf School as part of their week-long Sustainability workshop
• My next Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk: Columbia University on March 7th, 2016
• “Science: A Candle in the Dark” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Dan Ariely’s “Arming the Donkeys” podcast
• Announcing “Eco 101”, a series of blog posts on the basics of ecology
• Emerging Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution releases roadmap document
• How do we know when people are actually happy?
• Is there a trade-off between reproduction and creativity?
• Injury intuition confirmation bias? Farce article goes really viral
• Clever study shows how cooperative bacteria sanction — and therefore exclude — cheaters
• My personal experience that creationists gravitate to anything with even the faintest scent of scientific uncertainty (and what to do about it)
• Lev Ginzburg Fest: celebration of a “retirement”
• It was an honor to talk to St. Francis College!
• My first “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators” talk: next Friday at St. Francis College
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• Are technological optimists too optimistic about technological sustainability?
• Review of William B. Provine’s “The ‘Random Genetic Drift’ Fallacy”
• Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
• Open Book Publishers, an alternative model to academic presses
• Pivot #1: My popular science book idea may not get picked up by a literary agent
• Yeah, you can find me on Facebook and Google Plus now
• What open access evangelists often miss about the task at hand
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• ECOmotion Studios on Huffaker’s crazy experiments to make prey and predators coexist
• ECOmotion Studios on Simberloff & Wilson’s island biogeography experiments
• ECOmotion Studios on Hairston Smith Slobodkin and why the earth is green
• EcoMotion studios celebrates Robert Paine’s Pisaster experiments
• Formation of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution has the potential to catalyze research into how culture evolves
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• Evolution 2016 meeting will feature evolution-themed art exhibit
• Returning (somewhat reluctantly) to Twitter
• Resources for writing a popular science book (and particularly a proposal)
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on big animals in big cities
• Can we resolve the ‘group selection debate’ by focusing on human cooperation?
• E&E in A&D: Genetic profiling as art?
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• Do cancer cells play cooperate in the Prisoner’s Dilemma?
• My Evolution 2014 talk is on YouTube
• Recommendations for creating a more student-centered classroom
• Evolution 2014: Overall Impressions
• Evolution 2014: Day 4
• Evolution 2014: Synthesis centers can serve as incubators if they buffer researchers from the risk of failure
• Evolution 2014: Day 3
• Evolution 2014: Day 2
• Evolution 2014: Want to teach both sides? Have your students deconstruct creationist propaganda!
• Evolution 2014: EvoGrader will take the grading out of assessing student learning outcomes
• Evolution 2014: A clever way to see if creationist students understand evolutionary concepts
• Evolution 2014: The Evolution Film Festival was on fire!
• Evolution 2014: Day 1
• Evolution 2014: Could the right symbionts provide protection from chytrid infection to amphibians?
• Evolution 2014: Are island mutualist communities more likely to be nested because they are inherently more unstable?
• Evolution 2014: Is thyme a facultative mutualist with leguminous plants?
• Evolution 2014: Lemurs display huge diet diversity, and their gut microbes track this diversity
• Evolution 2014: Aphids protect themselves from parasitoids by harboring a bacteria whose viral parasite is toxic
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Evolution 2014: Evolution of cooperation in the high school classroom? You bet!
• Evolution 2014: NSF RCN-UBE program a great way to fund collaborative educational efforts
• Evolution 2014: Cooperative data collection is more meaningful than individual data collection
• Evolution 2014: Students can watch fly populations evolve in a matter of weeks
• Evolution 2014: Darwin’s “Backyard Beagle”
• Evolution 2014: Preview
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• John Oliver holds first “balanced” climate debate on television
• Our review paper on Late Pleistocene Extinction Modeling published in QRB!
• Cognitive Ethology and Cat Companionship
• String Theory: should we care?
• How understanding social evolution might help treat cancer
• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• Was Teilhard de Chardin the real inventor of an evolutionary approach to culture?
• Understanding the cascading effect of carnivore loss… before we lose all the carnivores
• Once considered clear, the line between ecological and evolutionary time scales is becoming more blurry
• Nice infographic on global and domestic food waste
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• Taking risks for the data
• New fossil finds provide unique insight into the variation found in “Man the Hunted”
• Open Access publishing and “peer review” fail the test of a well-designed hoax
• An amazing indictment of the academic publishing industry (in which most of us participate)
• Additional evidence that obesity may be due to environment, not just habits
• More press for paper that de-bunks the zero determinant superiority
• Ethnocentric cooperation dominates humanitarian cooperation in the computer… so why does humanitarianism persist?
• Think the Milgram Experiments tell us something definitive about human nature? Think again!
• Zero determinant strategy is just another short-term adaptation
• Where to publish in ecology & evolution without funding for page charges
• Working on a VUE concept map of the fieldTest simulation
• “The Sustainable Use of Fisheries” now a part of the EcoEd Digital Library
• Useful guides for writing good pseudocode
• Pratt Professor Ágnes Mócsy releases “Smashing Matters” short film
• A spatial version of the Traveler’s Dilemma allows cooperation to persist
• My review of Railsback and Grimm’s “Agent-based and individual-based modeling” textbook published in Ecology
• Up-Goer Five text editor challenges you to make accessible explanations
• Multiple Intelligences theory gets some neuroscientific support
• Freeman Dyson wins the contest, and then says the contest is stupid
• Fracking study retracted after the discovery of a massive conflict of interest
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• Does American faith in genetic determinism limit the achievement of our students?
• Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
• Slate article explores the big brain, big society connection
• Megan Frederickson shares the wonder of ant cooperation with Toronto Library patrons
• Chronicle of Higher Education feature explores the question of why more women do not succeed in science
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• Rogue iron fertilization? Things have gotten weird!
• Think that the DNA transfer is only from parents to offspring? Think again!
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• Agent-based modeling instead of game theory: I agree!
• Climate and Clean Air Coalition unites air pollution concerns
• Despite great press for Dyson, the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is still not the solution to human cooperation
• Rachel Carson still under attack for bringing her values to bear on her science
• Rebranding global warming as a health threat
• Open and fluid, science even requires constant revision of logos
• Would online data repositories solve the problem of scientific fraud?
• Steve C. Walker on optimistic but reasonable expectations for mathematics
• Biocreativity blog explores the interaction between biology and art
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• ESA 2012 Workshop #8, Getting off the Ground with Individual-Based Modeling: A Primer for Instructors and Researchers
• Preview of the 2012 Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• When any behavior can be modeled, real-world constraint is critical
• I am finally diving into NetLogo!
• Robert Krulwich on the value of telling stories about science
• Evolution may be too slow: British Columbia begins assisted migration of forests
• Apparently you need to know something about rare granite erosion to understand the evolution of multicellularity
• Should conservation scientists also be advocates for particular policies?
• A pharma-agricultural tragedy of the commons?
• Understanding the role of the Templeton Foundation in funding evolutionary biology research
• Prominent evolutionary biologists weigh in on whether humans can evolve into a ‘superorganism’
• A competitive nominee in the “weirdest YouTube video about a theoretical biology paper” category
• Gerald Carter produces an informative video on cooperation in vampire bats
• Interesting reports from the Consilience Conference
• Is a comic movie about getting a Ph.D. revealing of some scientific tragedies?
• Our brains are too smart to be tricked: diet sodas just make your body crave more calories
• Is human genetic research being hampered by a failure to share data?
• New study on birds uses remote tracking to provide detailed behavioral data
• E-print Network provides searchable access to the primary scientific literature
• I get downright evangelical about WordPress
• On the Media takes on the problem of scientific integrity in scientific journals and the popular media
• Understanding the effects of asymmetry and relatedness on social volunteerism
• Alife XIII conference explores the simulation of artificial life
• EcoHealth sponsors art competition
• National Academies Press releases proceedings for “Cooperation and Conflict” colloquium
• Marvin Charton, Pratt professor and renowned computational chemist, is dead at 80
• 2012 Sustainability Crash Course at Pratt Institute
• Steven Railsback and Volker Grimm offer new introduction to the process of agent- and individual-based modeling
• Costly signalling not so costly in the presence of comrades
• Patterns in mussel beds may reflect interaction between individual behavior and emergent environmental patterns
• Hurricane Irene evacuation naysayers point out some fundamental human problems with understanding risk
• Martin Nowak lecture on The Evolution of Cooperation at MIT
• If Only Game Designers Were Scientists
• Make Every Day Darwin Day, Minus the Darwin
• Computer-Based Tools for Teaching about Robert Axelrod’s Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• In the Light of Evolution V: Cooperation (January 7th)
• In the Light of Evolution V: Cooperation (An Abbreviated and Incomplete Social Network Analysis of the Speakers)
• E.O. Wilson’s “The Four Great Books of Darwin”
• Scientific American “Controlling the Brain with Light”
• Robert Trivers and colleagues on Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson’s “The evolution of eusociality”
• Steven Chillrud Visit to Pratt Institute
• ESA 2010 (Overall Impressions)
• ESA 2010 Day 6 (August 6th)
• ESA 2010 Day 5 (August 5th)
• ESA 2010 Day 4 (August 4th)
• ESA 2010 Day 3 (August 3rd)
• ESA 2010 Day 2 (August 2nd)
• ESA 2010 Day 1 (August 1st)
• Evolution 2010 (Overall Impressions)
• Evolution 2010 Day 5 (June 29th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 4 (June 28th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 3 (June 27th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 2 (June 26th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 1 (June 25th)
• Consilience
• Understanding biome-level response to climate change
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – “Big Models” Special Session
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday): Afternoon sessions
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – Mutualistic Networks Symposium
• ESA 2009 Meeting Day #2 (Monday)
• ESA 2009 Day #1 (Sunday)
• Human Adaptation and Happiness

Science as a career (13)

• Pratt Math & Science Department conducts search for new Chairperson
• “Mount H-Index”: I never made it to base camp, and I have still had some great adventures
• A Tribute to Dr. David Becker on the Occasion of his Retirement
• Lev Ginzburg Fest: celebration of a “retirement”
• Pivot #1: My popular science book idea may not get picked up by a literary agent
• What open access evangelists often miss about the task at hand
• Evolution 2014: Overall Impressions
• Evolution 2014: Synthesis centers can serve as incubators if they buffer researchers from the risk of failure
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• Where to publish in ecology & evolution without funding for page charges
• Chronicle of Higher Education feature explores the question of why more women do not succeed in science
• Should conservation scientists also be advocates for particular policies?
• Is a comic movie about getting a Ph.D. revealing of some scientific tragedies?

Science in Art & Design (35)

• STEAMplant project brings local primary school kids to Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden
• My interview with Ardis DeFreece has been published in SciArt Magazine
• Why Artists & Designers need Scientists: Exhibit A
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Who was the first to catalog color? Hint: it wasn’t designers!
• Like boats & science?… this might be the artist’s residency for you!
• Science and art in dialogue: Pratt Manhattan Gallery hosts Dr. Rachael Winfree
• Skeptoid podcast on Colony Collapse Disorder
• Julia Buntaine explores the potential power of art and science collaborations
• Biophotovoltaics: a promising design innovation, or a great example of lack of quantitative design?
• It’s good to remember how fast things change, culturally & biologically
• What can be made by mimicking biological “assemblies”?
• Art in the Lab hosts Brain Awareness Week event on March 16th, 2016
• Mist net photographs as art?
• ECOmotion Studios on Huffaker’s crazy experiments to make prey and predators coexist
• ECOmotion Studios on Simberloff & Wilson’s island biogeography experiments
• ECOmotion Studios on Hairston Smith Slobodkin and why the earth is green
• EcoMotion studios celebrates Robert Paine’s Pisaster experiments
• Evolution 2016 meeting will feature evolution-themed art exhibit
• Grass on a Pedestal
• E&E in A&D: Genetic profiling as art?
• Ben Knight’s “Phyletic gradualism / Punctuated equilibrium”
• My Evolution 2014 talk is on YouTube
• Evolution 2014: Day 1
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• I receive funding to initiate the WmD Project
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• Nice infographic on global and domestic food waste
• Pratt Professor Ágnes Mócsy releases “Smashing Matters” short film
• Mishele Lesser’s Genoscapes explores the meaning of human genetics
• Biocreativity blog explores the interaction between biology and art
• EcoHealth sponsors art competition
• Painting called “Endosymbiosis” honors the legacy of Lynn Margulis
• I am not the only one who likes to narrowly interpret creative works through my scientific lens
• Science in Art & Design: Justin Taylor’s “The Gospel of Anarchy”

Scientific Fraud (8)

• FDA investigators raid American Society of Human Genetics offices in Carl Zimmer cloning case
• Injury intuition confirmation bias? Farce article goes really viral
• Open Access publishing and “peer review” fail the test of a well-designed hoax
• Think the Milgram Experiments tell us something definitive about human nature? Think again!
• Fracking study retracted after the discovery of a massive conflict of interest
• Would online data repositories solve the problem of scientific fraud?
• A pharma-agricultural tragedy of the commons?
• On the Media takes on the problem of scientific integrity in scientific journals and the popular media

Sculpture (2)

• Science and art in dialogue: Pratt Manhattan Gallery hosts Dr. Rachael Winfree
• Julia Buntaine explores the potential power of art and science collaborations

Senescence (8)

• The most fundamental way in which culture pushes against biology
• WmD Episode #00002 has been released
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• Longer telomeres imparted by older fathers may forestall senescence
• Is Alzheimer’s disease caused by prion proliferation?
• Now if you could only keep your cytosine methylated you might live forever
• Do you still think God is good?
• ESA 2009 Meeting Day #2 (Monday)

Sex and Reproduction (36)

• SSE tells HHS to acknowledge sex and gender diversity
• When it comes to considering sex and gender, don’t forget sex determination
• Mom leaves, offspring get buff and work together
• Is sexualization of women driven by the structure of our economy?
• PBS’ Deep Look on Firefly communication and deception
• Moral Sense III approaches, June 2nd at St. Francis College
• I am honored to be part of Moral Sense III
• My article on adolescence featured in the This View of Life culture series
• You can check out my first Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk (at St. Francis College) on YouTube
• Great conversation at my Columbia University Population Biology Seminar talk
• What do we know about Cultural Transmission?
• Is there a trade-off between reproduction and creativity?
• Personalized DNA tests likely to provide further evidence of human inter-connectedness
• It was an honor to talk to St. Francis College!
• My first “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators” talk: next Friday at St. Francis College
• To be an effective critical theorist of science, it helps to understand science
• The problem with same sex attraction “for the good of the species”
• That beard and deep voice may be to put him in his place, not attract her
• Polygyny: the culture we dislike might not be the culture that is evolutionarily disfavored
• The prickly (and largely unknown) sex life of bats
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on synanthropes and urban island castaways
• The often-large difference between “breeding” and “parenting”
• Anne-Marie Slaughter on the tradeoff between work and caregiving
• When it comes to sex, we are consumately proximate
• The most fundamental way in which culture pushes against biology
• PCB Bioaccumulation and Polar Bear Penises
• Evolution 2014: Day 1
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• David Haig suggests that babies cry at night to prevent siblings
• Barash the gene accountant on that little economic driver called “reproduction”
• Cooperative child-rearing pays dividends for ruffed lemurs, irrespective of kinship
• Mammal monogamy still a mystery, but maybe more than a numbers game
• Isabella Rossellini tackles motherhood without human pretense
• New theory explaining the prevalence of homosexuality focuses on epigenetics
• Ever wonder about the swimming pattern of sperm?
• Barash not so enlightening on the paradox of human homosexuality
• Think that the DNA transfer is only from parents to offspring? Think again!
• Is sexual practice coevolving with our cultural technologies?
• Turtles caught in the act provide new paleontological insights
• Self-castration sometimes turns out to be good for reproductive success
• “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” exhibit at the American Museum on Natural History
• Sex and Slime on Fresh Air
• The beginning of sex as we know it

Sexual Competition (4)

• Is sexualization of women driven by the structure of our economy?
• My article on adolescence featured in the This View of Life culture series
• Personalized DNA tests likely to provide further evidence of human inter-connectedness
• That beard and deep voice may be to put him in his place, not attract her

Sexual Conflict (4)

• What do we know about Cultural Transmission?
• To be an effective critical theorist of science, it helps to understand science
• Polygyny: the culture we dislike might not be the culture that is evolutionarily disfavored
• David Haig suggests that babies cry at night to prevent siblings

Sexual Selection (4)

• PBS’ Deep Look on Firefly communication and deception
• To be an effective critical theorist of science, it helps to understand science
• That beard and deep voice may be to put him in his place, not attract her
• Evolution 2014: Day 1

Social Capital (3)

• Asymmetrical interaction best explained by superrational rather than rational strategy
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• Economic Whales and their Parasites

Social Dilemmas (2)

• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change

Social Diversity (11)

• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• It was an honor to talk to St. Francis College!
• My first “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators” talk: next Friday at St. Francis College
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• Group phenotypic composition: implications for individuals and their groups
• David Sloan Wilson on how Jeff Bezos don’t know squat about chickens (or evolution!)
• The often-large difference between “breeding” and “parenting”
• Do creative people have “messy minds”?
• Review of What We Made by Tom Finkelpearl
• Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
• Can “muppet theory” help explain behavioral heterogeneity in human social groups?

Social Media (1)

• What open access evangelists often miss about the task at hand

Social Network Analysis (1)

• In the Light of Evolution V: Cooperation (An Abbreviated and Incomplete Social Network Analysis of the Speakers)

Social Networks (24)

• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• Fascinating and clever study of how personal contact norms vary by relationship
• Malcolm Gladwell on the social contagion of mass shootings
• Review of What We Made by Tom Finkelpearl
• Do humans form genetically similar social groups independent of kinship?
• Model evidence that third party punishment only makes sense in tight-knit groups
• Does self organization of social networks foster cooperation in the face of cheating?
• An anecdote that illustrates the tremendous power of human network reciprocity
• My review of “Origins of Altruism and Cooperation” is published in QRB
• The benefits of a maintaining a relatively small in-group
• Making the formation of social networks more realistic also makes them more cooperative
• Megan Frederickson shares the wonder of ant cooperation with Toronto Library patrons
• Can neuroeconomics help economics become a real science?
• Enforcing norms may be for personal gain, not to maintain social order (at least amongst Santa Barbara undergraduates)
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• Lack of complete transparency presents an obstacle but not a block to cooperation
• Punishment, properly rewarded, can promote cooperation without corruption
• Experimental study of cooperation and population structure calls into question the importance of heterogeneity
• Call it “ethnocentrism” or the “green beard effect”, “tags” assist cooperation
• Wasps can recognize each other, by face
• Familiarity breeds… mutual aid (at least in some birds)
• Scientific American “Why We Help”
• PNAS paper explores the role of population structure in facilitating reciprocity
• Social Evolution Forum takes on role of social networking in human cooperation

Social Norms (37)

• SSE tells HHS to acknowledge sex and gender diversity
• NPR features Christopher Boehm on the love-hate relationship we have people in power
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• Arming the Donkeys on kids, parenting, and Burning Man
• Dan Ariely’s “Arming the Donkeys” podcast
• Understanding [culture + multilevel selection] = potential for Sustainability
• Would a “labor economy” lead to different outcomes than the “capital economy”?
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• Fascinating and clever study of how personal contact norms vary by relationship
• Jonathan Haidt on the business advantage of being ethical
• China shifts a failed cultural policy designed to stabilize population
• Should we compromise with nations that hunt whales?
• My testimonial for Gregory Tague’s “Evolution and Human Culture”
• New report on drug resistance highlights the tragedy of our antibiotics commons
• Does the ability to accumulate wealth make us value the future more?
• Asymmetrical interaction best explained by superrational rather than rational strategy
• Have we outgrown the scale of cooperation supported by the Big Gods of Big Religion?
• The most fundamental way in which culture pushes against biology
• Explaining the evolutionary explanation for handedness
• Can we resolve the ‘group selection debate’ by focusing on human cooperation?
• Is the threat of regulation enough to incentivize cooperation from nitrogen polluters?
• In the end, climate compromise comes down to writing and editing
• How stupid professorial attitudes towards Wikipedia are making students less savvy
• E&E in A&D: The Armstrong Lie
• The forces of cultural evolution push hard on political humor
• An anecdote that illustrates the tremendous power of human network reciprocity
• My review of “Origins of Altruism and Cooperation” is published in QRB
• Think the Milgram Experiments tell us something definitive about human nature? Think again!
• NPR provides a quick overview of the human drive to reciprocate
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• Can neuroeconomics help economics become a real science?
• Enforcing norms may be for personal gain, not to maintain social order (at least amongst Santa Barbara undergraduates)
• Larry Arnhart on Singer, Bowles, and Gintis and Darwinian libertarianism
• Nice summary piece on the state of research into human nature and morality by Agustín Fuentes
• There are plenty of organs out there: more altruism would end the social dilemma of who gets available organs
• Larry Arnhart reviews E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• David Sloan Wilson differentiates “Evolutionary Religious Studies” from “The New Atheism”

Social Science (4)

• How will the COVID-19 crisis affect action on climate change?
• I will be participating in the 2019 NCEP Teaching & Learning Studio
• Eco-Performance Lab during Pratt’s 2019 Green Week the first step of “To the Core of Me”
• My newest STEAMplant collaboration is “To the Core of Me: A Hike Play”
• My interview with Ardis DeFreece has been published in SciArt Magazine
• SSE tells HHS to acknowledge sex and gender diversity
• Can mathematics save us from partisan Gerrymandering?
• YES, microplastics end up in our guts. Now the question is from where? And to what effect?
• Australia’s a hot spot for climate change politics, climate change science, and climate change suffering
• Don’t blame people for being obese (blame their neighborhood)
• Is it possible that Trump’s science-adviser is a stealth climate-change accepter?
• Is sexualization of women driven by the structure of our economy?
• Alan Rabinowitz, 1953-2018
• I will present my EnviroAtlas class activities at NCSE 2018
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• BLUE WEEK 2017 comes to Pratt Institute
• Urban Transect Walks: helping your students see the overlap between ecological and social patterns
• Moral Sense III approaches, June 2nd at St. Francis College
• Gregory Tague to speak about Art & Adaptation at Pratt Institute
• Republicans release climate change plan based on “Respiration Reduction”
• Stunning archaeological find shocks the Pratt Photography Department
• Green Week 2017 opens at Pratt Institute
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• NPR features Christopher Boehm on the love-hate relationship we have people in power
• Another great Skeptoid episode, this one on race
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• 2016 Sustainability Summit live on Pratt’s Video Site
• Want to know where NYC’s water supply stands? There’s a DEP page for that!
• My ecological footprint for 2016-2017
• Wars on climate change versus revolutions to address climate change
• An inspiring summit, but big challenges at home and afar…
• Sustainability Summit at Pratt Institute featuring Josh Fox
• How Moodle allows you to remove your bias when grading quizzes
• Pratt students make the potential trip to Mars better designed
• Pratt Foundation teams up with Brooklyn College pyschologists to study perception and drawing
• Where’s the world’s biggest solar-electric power station going to be located?
• My ecological footprint for 2015-2016
• FDA investigators raid American Society of Human Genetics offices in Carl Zimmer cloning case
• Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson liberated after month-long kidnapping ordeal
• America Society of Primatologists condemns H. A. and Margret Rey, calls for Curious George boycott
• Alternative music legend Morrissey agrees to adopt 2 million feral cats in win-win for felines, Australian native fauna
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• Students succeed in convincing the Pratt Board of Trustees to divest from fossil fuels
• Great conversation at my Columbia University Population Biology Seminar talk
• “This is the Nature of Cities” podcast on urban bees and civic ecology
• “Science: A Candle in the Dark” podcast on Urban Ecology
• “In Defense of Plants” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Dan Ariely’s “Arming the Donkeys” podcast
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the return of five-lined skinks
• What do we know about Cultural Transmission?
• Food is personal, sometimes ethical, but rarely political
• How do we know when people are actually happy?
• Is there a trade-off between reproduction and creativity?
• Injury intuition confirmation bias? Farce article goes really viral
• Would a “labor economy” lead to different outcomes than the “capital economy”?
• How the built environment influences our ability to sustain personal and environmental commitments
• Personalized DNA tests likely to provide further evidence of human inter-connectedness
• My personal experience that creationists gravitate to anything with even the faintest scent of scientific uncertainty (and what to do about it)
• Is family-linked terrorism a cultural and genetic phenomenon?
• Crucial climate talks in Paris take place in a socially repressive environment
• To be an effective critical theorist of science, it helps to understand science
• Do we need to have a kinder, gentler one-child policy in Western industrial countries?
• Are technological optimists too optimistic about technological sustainability?
• Religious children are less altruistic… or maybe not…
• Fascinating and clever study of how personal contact norms vary by relationship
• Jonathan Haidt on the business advantage of being ethical
• What’s the evolved function of curiosity?
• Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
• China shifts a failed cultural policy designed to stabilize population
• Shark attacks are down, but you still have to make good decisions out there on the ocean
• Mist net photographs as art?
• Urbanization is not urbanization: density, not size, drives sustainability
• Does Bayesian bias aid us in making adaptive distorted self-assessments?
• Malcolm Gladwell on the social contagion of mass shootings
• What open access evangelists often miss about the task at hand
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• Without sustainability in our diets, we won’t be sustainable
• Is technological evolution “de-agglomerating” cultural innovation?
• Should we compromise with nations that hunt whales?
• My testimonial for Gregory Tague’s “Evolution and Human Culture”
• The often-large difference between “breeding” and “parenting”
• Anne-Marie Slaughter on the tradeoff between work and caregiving
• Do creative people have “messy minds”?
• Does the ability to accumulate wealth make us value the future more?
• Are big corporate polluters trying to “artwash” their image?
• Formation of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution has the potential to catalyze research into how culture evolves
• When it comes to sex, we are consumately proximate
• Darwin in social context? Ric Brown’s fascinating survey of some important contemporaries
• Have we outgrown the scale of cooperation supported by the Big Gods of Big Religion?
• Music, the cortisone balm?
• Should altruism have an effect on your final exam score?
• WmD Episode #00002 has been released
• Rivers, Lakes, Seas, and Environmental Justice
• Court Ruling in the Netherlands may point the way to cracking the climate compliance conundrum
• Zoonosis, Ebola, and the Elusive Reservoir Host
• Can we resolve the ‘group selection debate’ by focusing on human cooperation?
• Is the threat of regulation enough to incentivize cooperation from nitrogen polluters?
• In the end, climate compromise comes down to writing and editing
• New article in Science provides a comprehensive overview and update on Yellowstone National Park
• My ecological footprint for 2014-2015
• E&E in A&D: Genetic profiling as art?
• The forces of cultural evolution push hard on political humor
• Scientific American down on memorization
• Review of What We Made by Tom Finkelpearl
• Water, Alfalfa, China, and a modern Tragedy of the Commons
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• Do humans form genetically similar social groups independent of kinship?
• Evolution 2014: Want to teach both sides? Have your students deconstruct creationist propaganda!
• Evolution 2014: A clever way to see if creationist students understand evolutionary concepts
• Evolution 2014: Darwin’s “Backyard Beagle”
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• John Oliver holds first “balanced” climate debate on television
• Apparently I should stop holding my breath for the Google Translate “dolphin” module
• Donald Trump saves CitiBike, proving that selfishness and cooperation are no longer opposed
• Pledge, Petition, Protect! All at Green Week 2014!
• Cognitive Ethology and Cat Companionship
• TurnUp seeks to turn excess art materials into treasure, not trash
• String Theory: should we care?
• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• Was Teilhard de Chardin the real inventor of an evolutionary approach to culture?
• Why socially-progressive scientists should not make bets…
• Concentrated factory farming of livestock massively alters the phosphorus cycle
• CNN tackles climate change by explaining public goods games!
• Now legal, Northern California’s pot farms join the rest of agriculture in impacting water supply
• Nice infographic on global and domestic food waste
• Can you replicate the collective adaptive value of religion without god?
• Open Access publishing and “peer review” fail the test of a well-designed hoax
• An amazing indictment of the academic publishing industry (in which most of us participate)
• Think the Milgram Experiments tell us something definitive about human nature? Think again!
• Sarah Coakley on the connection between theology and evolutionary theory
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Is this site good enough to clone?
• Great NPR piece on how simple it would be for us to reduce carbon emissions
• The benefits of a maintaining a relatively small in-group
• Pratt Professor Ágnes Mócsy releases “Smashing Matters” short film
• Rhett Bradbury’s Master’s Thesis explores how gaming can foster political leadership
• Martin Nowak to lecture on the compatibility of god and the evolutionary process
• Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
• “Earth Hour” seeks to re-focus our attention on all the earth provides
• Seth Horowitz on our perception of sound
• Forward on Climate Rally seeks to shift the national dialogue on anthropogenic climate change
• Quantifying the climate value of that 40-acre woodlot
• Green port policies yield big decreases in the ecological footprint of shipping
• Dog license dataset opens up huge potential for understanding the dog-human mutualism
• Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
• Production on marginal lands can meet only 25% of our biofuel mandates
• Fracking study retracted after the discovery of a massive conflict of interest
• NPR provides a quick overview of the human drive to reciprocate
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• New evidence that economic cooperation existed between Vikings and Inuit
• Does American faith in genetic determinism limit the achievement of our students?
• Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• Chronicle of Higher Education feature explores the question of why more women do not succeed in science
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• Michael Ruse on James Lovelock’s Gaia of 2012
• Ready for eugenics 2.0?
• On becoming a psychopath
• Rogue iron fertilization? Things have gotten weird!
• New PNAS special issue explores the developmental effects of early social environment
• Rob Nixon on Rachel Carson’s prescience
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• Can neuroeconomics help economics become a real science?
• Barry Commoner, pioneering scientist and environmentalist, is dead at 95
• Enforcing norms may be for personal gain, not to maintain social order (at least amongst Santa Barbara undergraduates)
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• Some conservatives actually see the public health and economic dilemmas posed by greenhouse gas emissions
• Lack of complete transparency presents an obstacle but not a block to cooperation
• Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, cannot triangulate punishment
• What’s ironic is that the creationists do not realize that we evolutionists might be trying to understand their success
• Punishment, properly rewarded, can promote cooperation without corruption
• Climate and Clean Air Coalition unites air pollution concerns
• Are the Sentinelese the last untouched hunter-gatherer culture?
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• Rachel Carson still under attack for bringing her values to bear on her science
• Rebranding global warming as a health threat
• “School of Life” acknowledges the values in religion worth preserving
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• Greece’s massive recession is making it more ecologically sustainable
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Matthew Zimmerman on how international relations views the evolution of groups
• North American federal governments seek to defund environmental and ecological science
• A victory for collective action and national cooperation
• Leaving with empty hands, should Rio+20 participants nonetheless leave with a sense of optimism?
• Evolution may be too slow: British Columbia begins assisted migration of forests
• Peter Turchin on Steven Pinker’s “Grand Deception” hypotheses
• Should conservation scientists also be advocates for particular policies?
• Music evolves (culturally!) from noise to song under the influence of human selection
• David Barash illuminates the “EvoPolitics” of Darwin’s time
• A pharma-agricultural tragedy of the commons?
• Great Michael Ruse piece on the politics of resisting religious encroachment on evolutionary biology
• Ted Kaczynski as a scholar of resistance to technology
• Understanding the role of the Templeton Foundation in funding evolutionary biology research
• Is this what free-market conservation looks like?
• North Carolina legislators enact strict law limiting the rate of natural change
• Jason Collins questions the utility-to-fitness conversion
• Brian Czech warns ecologists against drinking the “sustainable growth Koolaid”
• Science Magazine outlines the big scientific issues at Rio+20
• Elinor Ostrom, pioneering social scientist and scholar of cooperation, is dead at 78
• Joseph E. Stiglitz discusses the economically destabilizing impact of rent-seeking
• Economic Whales and their Parasites
• Will invasive truffles become the bane of European epicures?
• Larry Arnhart reviews E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• David Sloan Wilson differentiates “Evolutionary Religious Studies” from “The New Atheism”
• Can environmentalists and the religious faithful work together to preserve creation?
• Are the most lucrative components of the financial sector parasites on the larger economy?
• UCS “Cooler Smarter” footprint calculator promotes lower carbon behaviors
• The Union of Concerned Scientists illuminates Monsanto’s role in maintaining unsustainable agricultural practices
• An argument for better Frankensteins (and thus more prudent use of technology)
• Molly H. Adams earns top honors from the Critical and Visual Studies program
• Richard Sennett’s “Together” explores the history of cooperative rituals
• James K. Galbraith makes the connection between debt policy and social stability
• 2012 Sustainability Crash Course at Pratt Institute
• What kind of in-group does Facebook represent?
• Is the European Union going rogue or playing altruist on airline emissions?
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Naturalistic Fallacy: 1, Sam Harris: 0
• Hurricane Irene evacuation naysayers point out some fundamental human problems with understanding risk
• How the right wing co-opts research into the evolution of cooperation
• Is humanity’s most dangerous technology debt?
• Mexican Culture and Collective Action
• National Geographic “Can China go green?”
• Easy-IPD version 1.0 released!
• Barash and Lipton on Bin Laden (and Us)
• “A Paradise Built in Hell” by Rebecca Solnit
• Make Every Day Darwin Day, Minus the Darwin
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• E.O. Wilson’s “The Four Great Books of Darwin”
• Using Ecological Footprints to Teach Sustainability
• Reclaiming a Rigorous Definition of “Sustainability”
• Official video of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010
• Greg Graffin on The Takeaway
• Scientific American “Controlling the Brain with Light”
• The Role of Technology in Human Evolution
• National Geographic’s “Science of Dogs”
• 2010 Convention on Biological Diversity and Ecosystem Services (Sorta)
• Robert Trivers and colleagues on Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson’s “The evolution of eusociality”
• Firefighting and the Tragedy of the Commons
• Asian Carp on NPR
• The Cove
• Steven Chillrud Visit to Pratt Institute
• NPR is all up in evolution
• Darwin’s Cathedral versus The God Delusion
• Consilience
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday): Afternoon sessions
• ESA 2009 Meeting Day #2 (Monday)
• Changing and not changing the way we use our agricultural land
• Common Ground Symposium at Columbia University
• An Introduction

Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution (3)

• My article on adolescence featured in the This View of Life culture series
• Emerging Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution releases roadmap document
• Formation of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution has the potential to catalyze research into how culture evolves

Society for the Study of Evolution (31)

• SSE tells HHS to acknowledge sex and gender diversity
• Evolution 2016 meeting will feature evolution-themed art exhibit
• My Evolution 2014 talk is on YouTube
• Evolution 2014: Overall Impressions
• Evolution 2014: Day 4
• Evolution 2014: Synthesis centers can serve as incubators if they buffer researchers from the risk of failure
• Evolution 2014: Day 3
• Evolution 2014: Day 2
• Evolution 2014: Want to teach both sides? Have your students deconstruct creationist propaganda!
• Evolution 2014: EvoGrader will take the grading out of assessing student learning outcomes
• Evolution 2014: A clever way to see if creationist students understand evolutionary concepts
• Evolution 2014: The Evolution Film Festival was on fire!
• Evolution 2014: Day 1
• Evolution 2014: Could the right symbionts provide protection from chytrid infection to amphibians?
• Evolution 2014: Are island mutualist communities more likely to be nested because they are inherently more unstable?
• Evolution 2014: Is thyme a facultative mutualist with leguminous plants?
• Evolution 2014: Lemurs display huge diet diversity, and their gut microbes track this diversity
• Evolution 2014: Aphids protect themselves from parasitoids by harboring a bacteria whose viral parasite is toxic
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Evolution 2014: Evolution of cooperation in the high school classroom? You bet!
• Evolution 2014: NSF RCN-UBE program a great way to fund collaborative educational efforts
• Evolution 2014: Cooperative data collection is more meaningful than individual data collection
• Evolution 2014: Students can watch fly populations evolve in a matter of weeks
• Evolution 2014: Darwin’s “Backyard Beagle”
• Evolution 2014: Preview
• Evolution 2010 (Overall Impressions)
• Evolution 2010 Day 5 (June 29th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 4 (June 28th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 3 (June 27th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 2 (June 26th)
• Evolution 2010 Day 1 (June 25th)

Sociology (23)

• What do we know about Cultural Transmission?
• Is there a trade-off between reproduction and creativity?
• Is technological evolution “de-agglomerating” cultural innovation?
• The often-large difference between “breeding” and “parenting”
• Anne-Marie Slaughter on the tradeoff between work and caregiving
• Formation of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution has the potential to catalyze research into how culture evolves
• E&E in A&D: Genetic profiling as art?
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• Do humans form genetically similar social groups independent of kinship?
• Why socially-progressive scientists should not make bets…
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• The benefits of a maintaining a relatively small in-group
• NPR provides a quick overview of the human drive to reciprocate
• Chronicle of Higher Education feature explores the question of why more women do not succeed in science
• New PNAS special issue explores the developmental effects of early social environment
• Matthew Zimmerman on how international relations views the evolution of groups
• Hurricane Irene evacuation naysayers point out some fundamental human problems with understanding risk
• How the right wing co-opts research into the evolution of cooperation
• Mexican Culture and Collective Action
• Easy-IPD version 1.0 released!
• Barash and Lipton on Bin Laden (and Us)
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• Robert Trivers and colleagues on Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson’s “The evolution of eusociality”

Soil Ecology (3)

• Rule number one of cooperative bacterial warfare? Be in the majority.
• Concentrated factory farming of livestock massively alters the phosphorus cycle
• There’s Dirt Under Them Thar Sidewalks

Sound Perception (2)

• What deficiencies in sound perception reveal about how we perceive sound
• Seth Horowitz on our perception of sound

Space Travel (4)

• Pratt students make the potential trip to Mars better designed
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• Man or astrobiology man?
• Mirsky on Poop in Space

Spatially Explicit Modeling (14)

• Are corals riding ocean currents to exert climate change dominance over macroalgae?
• Working on a VUE concept map of the fieldTest simulation
• A spatial version of the Traveler’s Dilemma allows cooperation to persist
• My review of Railsback and Grimm’s “Agent-based and individual-based modeling” textbook published in Ecology
• Agent-based modeling instead of game theory: I agree!
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• ESA 2012 Workshop #8, Getting off the Ground with Individual-Based Modeling: A Primer for Instructors and Researchers
• I am finally diving into NetLogo!
• Steven Railsback and Volker Grimm offer new introduction to the process of agent- and individual-based modeling
• Costly signalling not so costly in the presence of comrades
• Patterns in mussel beds may reflect interaction between individual behavior and emergent environmental patterns
• If Only Game Designers Were Scientists
• Computer-Based Tools for Teaching about Robert Axelrod’s Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments
• “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod

Speciation (7)

• Different hominin species not so species-like it seems
• Ben Knight’s “Phyletic gradualism / Punctuated equilibrium”
• Okay, I admit it: I am a bit of a Neanderthal
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• Shark species may be more cryptic than previously understood
• Could differential symbiosis be a mechanism by which genetically-variable hosts speciate?
• Cultural Evolution in a Hybrid Society

Sperm Competition (1)

• The prickly (and largely unknown) sex life of bats

STEAMplant (5)

• STEAMplant project brings local primary school kids to Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden
• Core of Me short video
• Eco-Performance Lab during Pratt’s 2019 Green Week the first step of “To the Core of Me”
• My newest STEAMplant collaboration is “To the Core of Me: A Hike Play”
• My interview with Ardis DeFreece has been published in SciArt Magazine

Stochasticity (1)

• Hurricane Irene evacuation naysayers point out some fundamental human problems with understanding risk

Student Writing (2)

• The argument against editing students’ drafts of written work
• G. Kim Blank on making writing work better by eliminating the term paper

Subsistence (4)

• Go mutualistic or go home?
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild”

Superorganisms (10)

• Further evidence that Hamilton was wrong about eusocial insects
• Bacterial societies defy selfish gene predictions
• Prominent evolutionary biologists weigh in on whether humans can evolve into a ‘superorganism’
• NY Times provides perspective on E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• Richard Dawkins on E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• David Sloan Wilson on Richard Dawkins on E.O. Wilson
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• Science in Art & Design: Justin Taylor’s “The Gospel of Anarchy”
• Robert Trivers and colleagues on Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson’s “The evolution of eusociality”
• The Quest for the Perfect Hive

Survival (9)

• Pratt students make the potential trip to Mars better designed
• Like to forage for mushrooms? Beware the Amanita!
• Go mutualistic or go home?
• WmD Episode #00002 has been released
• In the end, climate compromise comes down to writing and editing
• On the verge of 400 ppm Carbon Dioxide: a symbolic threshold
• For the next eight months, the future of my career is (mostly) out of my hands
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• Michael Ruse on James Lovelock’s Gaia of 2012
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• Rebranding global warming as a health threat
• Mount Everest and the limits of play
• Human limits extended one step further as wingsuit diver lands without a parachute
• Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild”

Sustainability (117)

• STEAMplant project brings local primary school kids to Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden
• How renewable power sources grow more trees
• Meta-analysis suggests that pesticides impair bee memory and learning
• No-till has some big no-catastrophic-climate-change potential
• What might we discover in the ocean twilight zone?
• Model suggests that warming climate will catalyze greater insect-pest crop losses
• Escape is a big risk in aquaculture
• Both primates have their own uses for the same land
• Professor Jensen’s Guide to Urban Cycling
• I will present my EnviroAtlas class activities at NCSE 2018
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Pratt Math & Science Department conducts search for new Chairperson
• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• BLUE WEEK 2017 comes to Pratt Institute
• Urban Transect Walks: helping your students see the overlap between ecological and social patterns
• Hey, ho, Portland Oregon ESA 2017, let’s go!
• Moral Sense III approaches, June 2nd at St. Francis College
• Republicans release climate change plan based on “Respiration Reduction”
• Green Week 2017 opens at Pratt Institute
• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Science and art in dialogue: Pratt Manhattan Gallery hosts Dr. Rachael Winfree
• Celebrating Studio Days (Fall 2016)
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• 2016 Sustainability Summit live on Pratt’s Video Site
• Julia Buntaine explores the potential power of art and science collaborations
• Concerned about NYC’s air quality? Here’s a quick page to check…
• Want to know where NYC’s water supply stands? There’s a DEP page for that!
• My ecological footprint for 2016-2017
• An inspiring summit, but big challenges at home and afar…
• Sustainability Summit at Pratt Institute featuring Josh Fox
• Biophotovoltaics: a promising design innovation, or a great example of lack of quantitative design?
• Where’s the world’s biggest solar-electric power station going to be located?
• It’s good to remember how fast things change, culturally & biologically
• What can be made by mimicking biological “assemblies”?
• My ecological footprint for 2015-2016
• Alternative music legend Morrissey agrees to adopt 2 million feral cats in win-win for felines, Australian native fauna
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• Students succeed in convincing the Pratt Board of Trustees to divest from fossil fuels
• What’s the meaning of professorial fashion?
• Great conversation at my Columbia University Population Biology Seminar talk
• I am honored to be visiting the Green Meadow Waldorf School as part of their week-long Sustainability workshop
• “This is the Nature of Cities” podcast on urban bees and civic ecology
• “In Defense of Plants” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the return of five-lined skinks
• Why are architects required to take a course focused on ecology and environmental science?
• Food is personal, sometimes ethical, but rarely political
• Is New York City a “sustainable” metropolis?
• Understanding [culture + multilevel selection] = potential for Sustainability
• Would a “labor economy” lead to different outcomes than the “capital economy”?
• How the built environment influences our ability to sustain personal and environmental commitments
• Crucial climate talks in Paris take place in a socially repressive environment
• Do we need to have a kinder, gentler one-child policy in Western industrial countries?
• Are technological optimists too optimistic about technological sustainability?
• Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
• China shifts a failed cultural policy designed to stabilize population
• Does the rapid spread of a culture of over-exploitation intensify our impact on wild food sources?
• While we vacuum the seas, we may as well clean them of debris…
• Cargo ships a major source of NOx emissions
• Why the “just burn it all” approach to ending fossil fuel dependence does not work
• Urbanization is not urbanization: density, not size, drives sustainability
• What open access evangelists often miss about the task at hand
• I will speak about the tension between biological and cultural evolution at St. Francis College (December 11th, 2015 @ 3pm)
• Without sustainability in our diets, we won’t be sustainable
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on synanthropes and urban island castaways
• Should we compromise with nations that hunt whales?
• Are big corporate polluters trying to “artwash” their image?
• Carrying capacity — but not growth rate — varies with habitat quality (at least for moose)
• Go mutualistic or go home?
• So much for the big-brained city bird theory?
• Rivers, Lakes, Seas, and Environmental Justice
• Sadly, the Population Bombers (mostly) still don’t get it
• Court Ruling in the Netherlands may point the way to cracking the climate compliance conundrum
• NYC Solar Map: a powerful tool for transformation to a solar future
• In the end, climate compromise comes down to writing and editing
• My ecological footprint for 2014-2015
• Envirolutions brings bottle transformation to Green Week 2015
• On the verge of 400 ppm Carbon Dioxide: a symbolic threshold
• Water, Alfalfa, China, and a modern Tragedy of the Commons
• This site is now hosted by A Small Orange
• Choosing a more sustainable web host
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• John Oliver holds first “balanced” climate debate on television
• There’s No Such Thing as Qualitative Sustainability
• Donald Trump saves CitiBike, proving that selfishness and cooperation are no longer opposed
• New glacial maximum on Mount ARC provides definitive evidence that Pratt’s sustainability efforts are working
• Pledge, Petition, Protect! All at Green Week 2014!
• Interesting numbers on the sustainability (or lack thereof) of the aviation industry
• If sloths endure costs to maintain closed-loop agricultural systems, why can’t we?
• Do we need to delete to keep the web sustainable?
• TurnUp seeks to turn excess art materials into treasure, not trash
• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology
• Why socially-progressive scientists should not make bets…
• Cod gone on Cape Cod
• Concentrated factory farming of livestock massively alters the phosphorus cycle
• CNN tackles climate change by explaining public goods games!
• Now legal, Northern California’s pot farms join the rest of agriculture in impacting water supply
• Nice infographic on global and domestic food waste
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• What the move towards a more sustainable Pratt looks like…
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Great NPR piece on how simple it would be for us to reduce carbon emissions
• NPR piece suggests that economics are pushing us towards nutrient recycling
• Envirolutions asks the Pratt community to identify where there is “room for improvement”
• Envirolutions club launches its “Room for Improvement” campaign
• Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
• “Earth Hour” seeks to re-focus our attention on all the earth provides
• Quantifying the climate value of that 40-acre woodlot
• Green port policies yield big decreases in the ecological footprint of shipping
• Production on marginal lands can meet only 25% of our biofuel mandates
• Charlotte Douglas International Airport employs worms to close the loop on airport waste
• Fracking study retracted after the discovery of a massive conflict of interest
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• Pratt Envirolutions Students Bring Recycling Bins to Campus
• Envirolutions students release Trash Tetris video to promote recycling bin launch
• Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• Michael Ruse on James Lovelock’s Gaia of 2012
• Rogue iron fertilization? Things have gotten weird!
• Barry Commoner, pioneering scientist and environmentalist, is dead at 95
• Climate and Clean Air Coalition unites air pollution concerns
• Reductions in fertilizer use are now worth carbon credits
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• Greece’s massive recession is making it more ecologically sustainable
• “Adaptive” approach to climate change puts faith in resilience thinking
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• Preview of the 2012 Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon
• Great NPR piece on NYC taxis highlights the importance of testing assumptions with modeling
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Mark Bittman on the ecological imperative of eating less meat
• Changing rice from C3 to C4 in order to feed our growing population
• Macroecologists weigh in on how well sustainability science considers ecological limits
• Leaving with empty hands, should Rio+20 participants nonetheless leave with a sense of optimism?
• Evolution may be too slow: British Columbia begins assisted migration of forests
• National Geographic’s “If They Could Only Talk” considers Easter Island’s many mysteries
• Would you like a few red-listed species with that shrimp cocktail sir?
• North Carolina legislators enact strict law limiting the rate of natural change
• There is no doubt that there are conservation trade-offs associated with the proliferation of wind power
• Brian Czech warns ecologists against drinking the “sustainable growth Koolaid”
• Science Magazine outlines the big scientific issues at Rio+20
• The Australian Government blocks coal mine to protect the Great Barrier Reef
• Joseph E. Stiglitz discusses the economically destabilizing impact of rent-seeking
• Economic Whales and their Parasites
• Can environmentalists and the religious faithful work together to preserve creation?
• Are the most lucrative components of the financial sector parasites on the larger economy?
• UCS “Cooler Smarter” footprint calculator promotes lower carbon behaviors
• The Union of Concerned Scientists illuminates Monsanto’s role in maintaining unsustainable agricultural practices
• An argument for better Frankensteins (and thus more prudent use of technology)
• Can cod come back?
• Is the sustainability movement too eco-centric?
• Green Week events celebrate cycling and recycling
• 2012 Sustainability Crash Course at Pratt Institute
• Is the European Union going rogue or playing altruist on airline emissions?
• Joel E. Cohen on the 7 billion human mark
• Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• National Geographic “Can China go green?”
• Pratt Envirolutions trumpets green initiatives during Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Pratt Envirolutions leads campaign for reusable containers
• Extensifying Sustainability
• Using Ecological Footprints to Teach Sustainability
• Reclaiming a Rigorous Definition of “Sustainability”
• Are Eco-labels an Effective Tool for Conservation?
• Official video of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010
• Vegans and the Quest for Sanity
• Crade-to-Cradle
• ESA 2009 Meeting Day #2 (Monday)
• ESA 2009 Day #1 (Sunday)
• Changing and not changing the way we use our agricultural land
• Quantitative Sustainability and the practice of Life Cycle Analysis
• Common Ground Symposium at Columbia University

Sustainable Agriculture (20)

• Meta-analysis suggests that pesticides impair bee memory and learning
• No-till has some big no-catastrophic-climate-change potential
• Model suggests that warming climate will catalyze greater insect-pest crop losses
• Both primates have their own uses for the same land
• Science and art in dialogue: Pratt Manhattan Gallery hosts Dr. Rachael Winfree
• Julia Buntaine explores the potential power of art and science collaborations
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• I am honored to be visiting the Green Meadow Waldorf School as part of their week-long Sustainability workshop
• Are technological optimists too optimistic about technological sustainability?
• Without sustainability in our diets, we won’t be sustainable
• Water, Alfalfa, China, and a modern Tragedy of the Commons
• Concentrated factory farming of livestock massively alters the phosphorus cycle
• NPR piece suggests that economics are pushing us towards nutrient recycling
• Production on marginal lands can meet only 25% of our biofuel mandates
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• Reductions in fertilizer use are now worth carbon credits
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• Changing rice from C3 to C4 in order to feed our growing population
• The Union of Concerned Scientists illuminates Monsanto’s role in maintaining unsustainable agricultural practices

Sustainable Energy (30)

• How renewable power sources grow more trees
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• 2016 Sustainability Summit live on Pratt’s Video Site
• An inspiring summit, but big challenges at home and afar…
• Biophotovoltaics: a promising design innovation, or a great example of lack of quantitative design?
• Where’s the world’s biggest solar-electric power station going to be located?
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• Students succeed in convincing the Pratt Board of Trustees to divest from fossil fuels
• I am honored to be visiting the Green Meadow Waldorf School as part of their week-long Sustainability workshop
• Crucial climate talks in Paris take place in a socially repressive environment
• Are technological optimists too optimistic about technological sustainability?
• NYC Solar Map: a powerful tool for transformation to a solar future
• In the end, climate compromise comes down to writing and editing
• This site is now hosted by A Small Orange
• Choosing a more sustainable web host
• New glacial maximum on Mount ARC provides definitive evidence that Pratt’s sustainability efforts are working
• Do we need to delete to keep the web sustainable?
• Great NPR piece on how simple it would be for us to reduce carbon emissions
• Envirolutions asks the Pratt community to identify where there is “room for improvement”
• Envirolutions club launches its “Room for Improvement” campaign
• “Earth Hour” seeks to re-focus our attention on all the earth provides
• Production on marginal lands can meet only 25% of our biofuel mandates
• Fracking study retracted after the discovery of a massive conflict of interest
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• Barry Commoner, pioneering scientist and environmentalist, is dead at 95
• Climate and Clean Air Coalition unites air pollution concerns
• There is no doubt that there are conservation trade-offs associated with the proliferation of wind power
• The Australian Government blocks coal mine to protect the Great Barrier Reef
• UCS “Cooler Smarter” footprint calculator promotes lower carbon behaviors
• National Geographic “Can China go green?”

Sustainable Harvesting (10)

• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• I am honored to be visiting the Green Meadow Waldorf School as part of their week-long Sustainability workshop
• While we vacuum the seas, we may as well clean them of debris…
• Should we compromise with nations that hunt whales?
• Carrying capacity — but not growth rate — varies with habitat quality (at least for moose)
• Cod gone on Cape Cod
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• Would you like a few red-listed species with that shrimp cocktail sir?
• Can cod come back?

Sustainable Pratt (12)

• Eco-Performance Lab during Pratt’s 2019 Green Week the first step of “To the Core of Me”
• BLUE WEEK 2017 comes to Pratt Institute
• Pratt News features short piece on Dr. Roland Kays’s campus visit
• Green Week 2017 opens at Pratt Institute
• 2016 Sustainability Summit live on Pratt’s Video Site
• It’s good to remember how fast things change, culturally & biologically
• Envirolutions brings bottle transformation to Green Week 2015
• New glacial maximum on Mount ARC provides definitive evidence that Pratt’s sustainability efforts are working
• Pledge, Petition, Protect! All at Green Week 2014!
• Green Week events celebrate cycling and recycling
• 2012 Sustainability Crash Course at Pratt Institute
• Pratt Envirolutions trumpets green initiatives during Pratt’s Green Week celebration

Sustainable Transportation (15)

• Professor Jensen’s Guide to Urban Cycling
• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• I am honored to be visiting the Green Meadow Waldorf School as part of their week-long Sustainability workshop
• Is New York City a “sustainable” metropolis?
• How the built environment influences our ability to sustain personal and environmental commitments
• Are technological optimists too optimistic about technological sustainability?
• Cargo ships a major source of NOx emissions
• Donald Trump saves CitiBike, proving that selfishness and cooperation are no longer opposed
• Pledge, Petition, Protect! All at Green Week 2014!
• Interesting numbers on the sustainability (or lack thereof) of the aviation industry
• Green port policies yield big decreases in the ecological footprint of shipping
• Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
• Greece’s massive recession is making it more ecologically sustainable
• Great NPR piece on NYC taxis highlights the importance of testing assumptions with modeling
• Green Week events celebrate cycling and recycling

Sustainable Urban Design (15)

• I will present my EnviroAtlas class activities at NCSE 2018
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Urban Transect Walks: helping your students see the overlap between ecological and social patterns
• Julia Buntaine explores the potential power of art and science collaborations
• Want to know where NYC’s water supply stands? There’s a DEP page for that!
• Biophotovoltaics: a promising design innovation, or a great example of lack of quantitative design?
• It’s good to remember how fast things change, culturally & biologically
• “This is the Nature of Cities” podcast on urban bees and civic ecology
• “In Defense of Plants” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Is New York City a “sustainable” metropolis?
• How the built environment influences our ability to sustain personal and environmental commitments
• Are technological optimists too optimistic about technological sustainability?
• Urbanization is not urbanization: density, not size, drives sustainability
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on synanthropes and urban island castaways
• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology

Sustainable Web Design (3)

• This site is now hosted by A Small Orange
• Choosing a more sustainable web host
• Do we need to delete to keep the web sustainable?

System Stability (21)

• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• David Sloan Wilson on how Jeff Bezos don’t know squat about chickens (or evolution!)
• Evolution beyond adaptation: a critical step for evolutionary theory
• Evolution 2014: Are island mutualist communities more likely to be nested because they are inherently more unstable?
• Does self organization of social networks foster cooperation in the face of cheating?
• More press for paper that de-bunks the zero determinant superiority
• Zero determinant strategy is just another short-term adaptation
• Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• Punishment, properly rewarded, can promote cooperation without corruption
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Perhaps nestedness is just an artifact of ecological opportunity (and not stability)
• Economic Whales and their Parasites
• James K. Galbraith makes the connection between debt policy and social stability
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Eco-mysticism in the Ecology Classroom, Discontinuity in Evolutionary Theory
• If Only Game Designers Were Scientists
• Computer-Based Tools for Teaching about Robert Axelrod’s Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – Mutualistic Networks Symposium

System Stability (6)

• What “rolling coal” has to say about the cultural state of sustainability efforts
• David Sloan Wilson on how Jeff Bezos don’t know squat about chickens (or evolution!)
• Evolution beyond adaptation: a critical step for evolutionary theory
• Evolution 2014: Are island mutualist communities more likely to be nested because they are inherently more unstable?
• Does self organization of social networks foster cooperation in the face of cheating?
• More press for paper that de-bunks the zero determinant superiority
• Zero determinant strategy is just another short-term adaptation
• Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• Punishment, properly rewarded, can promote cooperation without corruption
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Perhaps nestedness is just an artifact of ecological opportunity (and not stability)
• Economic Whales and their Parasites
• James K. Galbraith makes the connection between debt policy and social stability
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Eco-mysticism in the Ecology Classroom, Discontinuity in Evolutionary Theory
• If Only Game Designers Were Scientists
• Computer-Based Tools for Teaching about Robert Axelrod’s Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments
• ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – Mutualistic Networks Symposium

Taiga (Boreal Forest) (4)

• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• Evolution may be too slow: British Columbia begins assisted migration of forests
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Understanding biome-level response to climate change

Talks & Seminars (23)

Taphonomic Processes (1)

• Is the “hopelessly incomplete” fossil record a little better than we give it credit for?

Taxonomic Groups (1)

• Break not the ungulate culture of migration
• Humans arrive, other mammals shrink
• We aren’t the only gardeners on Madgascar
• Both primates have their own uses for the same land
• Alan Rabinowitz, 1953-2018
• Who was the first to catalog color? Hint: it wasn’t designers!
• Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• Science and art in dialogue: Pratt Manhattan Gallery hosts Dr. Rachael Winfree
• America Society of Primatologists condemns H. A. and Margret Rey, calls for Curious George boycott
• Alternative music legend Morrissey agrees to adopt 2 million feral cats in win-win for felines, Australian native fauna
• Like to forage for mushrooms? Beware the Amanita!
• “Science: A Candle in the Dark” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Primates — but not their rodent relatives — can infer the effects of other individuals on resource availability
• Mist net photographs as art?
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on synanthropes and urban island castaways
• Open Tree of Life allows experts and novices alike to explore “the” phylogeny
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• Our culture is special, but not especially uncommon
• So much for the big-brained city bird theory?
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on big animals in big cities
• Evolution 2014: Lemurs display huge diet diversity, and their gut microbes track this diversity
• Is “nest parasitism” really “nest mutualism”?
• New research suggests that chimpanzees understand that cooperation produces benefits
• Dog license dataset opens up huge potential for understanding the dog-human mutualism
• Further evidence that Hamilton was wrong about eusocial insects
• Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, cannot triangulate punishment
• Identifying the genes that gave dolphins their big brains
• Bird study suggests that multilevel selection theory is necessary to understand population dynamics
• Preschoolers cooperatively rock chimps in puzzle tournament
• Familiarity breeds… mutual aid (at least in some birds)
• There is no doubt that there are conservation trade-offs associated with the proliferation of wind power
• Bonobo sequence establishes that humans are equally but dissimilarly related to our chimpanzee relatives
• {Canis lupus familiaris + Homo sapiens} versus Homo neanderthalenthis?
• I knew that dog was watching me: Jennifer Verdolin confirms my worst fears
• Are dolphins on their way to domesticating humans?

Teaching (62)

• STEAMplant project brings local primary school kids to Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden
• The first product of a three-year-long Faculty Learning Community project
• I will be a 2019-2020 Center for Teaching & Learning Fellow
• An analysis of my course evaluations (Spring 2019)
• How does this professor really spend his work time? (Spring 2019)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2019)
• I will be participating in the 2019 NCEP Teaching & Learning Studio
• My newest STEAMplant collaboration is “To the Core of Me: A Hike Play”
• How does this professor really spend his work time? (Fall 2018)
• A cool (new-ish) IPD game theory simulator!
• When it comes to considering sex and gender, don’t forget sex determination
• My entry on the evolution of play will be added to the massive Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science
• I will present my EnviroAtlas class activities at NCSE 2018
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2017)
• Pratt Math & Science Department conducts search for new Chairperson
• Deep Look on nutrient transport by salmon
• Transfer of Learning FLC to present at Pratt lunch event
• Hey, ho, Portland Oregon ESA 2017, let’s go!
• The argument against editing students’ drafts of written work
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2017)
• Green Week 2017 opens at Pratt Institute
• Eco 101: Exponential Growth & Decay
• What in Darwin’s name was I thinking? (#001)
• Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2016)
• Celebrating Studio Days (Fall 2016)
• My ecological footprint for 2016-2017
• How Moodle allows you to remove your bias when grading quizzes
• I’ll be spreading the Learning Management System love at Pratt in early November
• The question is how — not whether — students use electronic devices in the classroom
• An interesting model for ditching the deadline
• An analysis of my course evaluations for Spring 2016
• Biophotovoltaics: a promising design innovation, or a great example of lack of quantitative design?
• A potentially interesting Evolution of Play documentary
• A Tribute to Dr. David Becker on the Occasion of his Retirement
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2016)
• Where’s the world’s biggest solar-electric power station going to be located?
• What can be made by mimicking biological “assemblies”?
• My ecological footprint for 2015-2016
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• Students succeed in convincing the Pratt Board of Trustees to divest from fossil fuels
• What’s the meaning of professorial fashion?
• I visit Pratt’s Poetics Lab focused on play
• Announcing “Eco 101”, a series of blog posts on the basics of ecology
• Why are architects required to take a course focused on ecology and environmental science?
• Eco 101: Carrying Capacity
• End: Sabbatical; Resume: Teaching
• Is New York City a “sustainable” metropolis?
• Personalized DNA tests likely to provide further evidence of human inter-connectedness
• My first “Breeders, Propagators, & Creators” talk: next Friday at St. Francis College
• What deficiencies in sound perception reveal about how we perceive sound
• How much impact can a set of free game theory infographics have?
• To be an effective critical theorist of science, it helps to understand science
• Are technological optimists too optimistic about technological sustainability?
• Higher education teaching loads are about economics, not valuing teaching
• Maybe infants don’t really care who helps and who hinders after all…
• The problem with same sex attraction “for the good of the species”
• Fascinating and clever study of how personal contact norms vary by relationship
• That beard and deep voice may be to put him in his place, not attract her
• What’s the evolved function of curiosity?
• Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
• Why the “just burn it all” approach to ending fossil fuel dependence does not work
• Charismatic megafauna offer protection to their less appealing heterospecifics
• Urbanization is not urbanization: density, not size, drives sustainability
• W.W. Norton’s new InQuizitive partner to the Bergstrom and Dugatkin Evolution textbook
• What open access evangelists often miss about the task at hand
• ECOmotion Studios on Huffaker’s crazy experiments to make prey and predators coexist
• ECOmotion Studios on Simberloff & Wilson’s island biogeography experiments
• EcoMotion studios celebrates Robert Paine’s Pisaster experiments
• Is there any way to get students to come to class on time?
• Should altruism have an effect on your final exam score?
• Are there better ways of using course evaluations?
• Would killing my final exam make my class more memorable?
• Explaining the evolutionary explanation for handedness
• An analysis of my course evaluations for Spring 2015
• Pedagogical modeling in the higher education classroom
• My new favorite concept mapping activity: depicting whole-system ecological flows
• A niche with the masses?
• Tenured and mostly a teacher? I think that is already happening, whether or not we admit it.
• Do our students only respond to high-stakes testing?
• Sabbatical, Sweet Sabbatical
• Celebrating Studios Days Spring 2015
• New article in Science provides a comprehensive overview and update on Yellowstone National Park
• My ecological footprint for 2014-2015
• How stupid professorial attitudes towards Wikipedia are making students less savvy
• I am taking my semester of rest… come Fall 2015
• Basic instructions for making effective concept maps using VUE
• Scientific American down on memorization
• Today I am Associate Professor
• A modest presentation on Open Information Environments
• My Evolution 2014 talk is on YouTube
• Recommendations for creating a more student-centered classroom
• Evolution 2014: Overall Impressions
• Evolution 2014: Day 2
• Evolution 2014: Want to teach both sides? Have your students deconstruct creationist propaganda!
• Evolution 2014: EvoGrader will take the grading out of assessing student learning outcomes
• Evolution 2014: A clever way to see if creationist students understand evolutionary concepts
• Evolution 2014: The Evolution Film Festival was on fire!
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Evolution 2014: NSF RCN-UBE program a great way to fund collaborative educational efforts
• Evolution 2014: Cooperative data collection is more meaningful than individual data collection
• Evolution 2014: Darwin’s “Backyard Beagle”
• Open Information Environments and the 21st Century College Classroom
• Moodle Tip: Using anchor links to create your own course page menu
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• Cath Dennis publishes non-computerized classroom adaptation of Axelrod’s iPD Tournament
• It appears that Pratt is going to keep me
• I receive funding to initiate the WmD Project
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• Are MOOCs just the clunky starting place for a more evolved form of new teaching?
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• I will participate in a roundtable discussion on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
• Are MOOCs and the arts incompatible?
• For the next eight months, the future of my career is (mostly) out of my hands
• Recognizing the difference between what the big and small educational institutions offer
• An anecdote that illustrates the tremendous power of human network reciprocity
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Is this site good enough to clone?
• My decision to make my course evaluations public
• How will I deliver conceptual understanding?
• Embarking on a grand experiment in conceptual teaching
• Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno
• Working on a VUE concept map of the fieldTest simulation
• “The Sustainable Use of Fisheries” now a part of the EcoEd Digital Library
• Rhett Bradbury’s Master’s Thesis explores how gaming can foster political leadership
• Up-Goer Five text editor challenges you to make accessible explanations
• As the nature of university-level teaching changes, should we re-assess the credit hour?
• Roberts Publishing releases an iPad version of their majors Evolution textbook
• Mishele Lesser’s Genoscapes explores the meaning of human genetics
• G. Kim Blank on making writing work better by eliminating the term paper
• Does American faith in genetic determinism limit the achievement of our students?
• Concept mapping as a creative tool
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• Preview of the 2012 Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• Drift may be not be specific to genetic systems
• New assessment of scientific reasoning skills suggests that students need better inquiry-based education
• Great Michael Ruse piece on the politics of resisting religious encroachment on evolutionary biology
• A competitive nominee in the “weirdest YouTube video about a theoretical biology paper” category
• Once your subject becomes a continuing education class…
• Peacocks communicate via the (ultra)sounds they make with their feathers
• “EvoLudo” site provides tutorials on evolutionary games related to cooperation
• “Evolution and Games” site provides tutorials on cooperation theory
• Bruce B. Henderson on the unappreciated importance of “consumatory scholarship”
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project launches with its first release of graphic packages
• Molly H. Adams earns top honors from the Critical and Visual Studies program
• “Open Yale” course provides the fundamentals of Game Theory for free
• The tragically early passing of Fred Rubino, an influential Brooklyn educator
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First images
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Eco-mysticism in the Ecology Classroom, Discontinuity in Evolutionary Theory
• Online tools for teaching the basics of population growth
• Proper set-up for Concept Mapping with VUE
• Easy-IPD version 1.0 released!
• Make Every Day Darwin Day, Minus the Darwin
• Computer-Based Tools for Teaching about Robert Axelrod’s Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments
• Using Ecological Footprints to Teach Sustainability
• Official video of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010
• National Geographic’s “Science of Dogs”
• Firefighting and the Tragedy of the Commons
• The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution
• National Geographic “Wolf Wars”
• The Cove
• Sourcing sources of selection
• Teaching evolution and game theory, simultaneously
• Moving away from textbooks
• Understanding biome-level response to climate change
• National Geographic “Fatal Attraction”
• ESA 2009 Meeting Day #2 (Monday)

Teaching Tools (34)

• A cool (new-ish) IPD game theory simulator!
• I will present my EnviroAtlas class activities at NCSE 2018
• Eco 101: Exponential Growth & Decay
• My ecological footprint for 2016-2017
• The question is how — not whether — students use electronic devices in the classroom
• Announcing “Eco 101”, a series of blog posts on the basics of ecology
• Eco 101: Carrying Capacity
• How much impact can a set of free game theory infographics have?
• W.W. Norton’s new InQuizitive partner to the Bergstrom and Dugatkin Evolution textbook
• My new favorite concept mapping activity: depicting whole-system ecological flows
• Basic instructions for making effective concept maps using VUE
• My Evolution 2014 talk is on YouTube
• Recommendations for creating a more student-centered classroom
• Evolution 2014: EvoGrader will take the grading out of assessing student learning outcomes
• Evolution 2014: The Evolution Film Festival was on fire!
• Evolution 2014: Day 0
• Evolution 2014: NSF RCN-UBE program a great way to fund collaborative educational efforts
• Moodle Tip: Using anchor links to create your own course page menu
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• Cath Dennis publishes non-computerized classroom adaptation of Axelrod’s iPD Tournament
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• I will participate in a roundtable discussion on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
• Are MOOCs and the arts incompatible?
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• “The Sustainable Use of Fisheries” now a part of the EcoEd Digital Library
• Roberts Publishing releases an iPad version of their majors Evolution textbook
• My ESA 2012 Poster is on Faculty of 1000 posters
• ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
• Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity
• “EvoLudo” site provides tutorials on evolutionary games related to cooperation
• “Evolution and Games” site provides tutorials on cooperation theory
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project launches with its first release of graphic packages
• Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First images
• Online tools for teaching the basics of population growth
• Easy-IPD version 1.0 released!
• Computer-Based Tools for Teaching about Robert Axelrod’s Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments
• Using Ecological Footprints to Teach Sustainability

Temperate Forest (13)

• Core of Me short video
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Deep Look on nutrient transport by salmon
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• Like to forage for mushrooms? Beware the Amanita!
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• WmD Episode #00003 has been released
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Evolution may be too slow: British Columbia begins assisted migration of forests
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• National Geographic “Wolf Wars”

Temperate Rainforest (6)

• Like to forage for mushrooms? Beware the Amanita!
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Quantifying the climate value of that 40-acre woodlot
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• The many ecotones of the Columbia Gorge

Terrestrial (7)

• Core of Me short video
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Deep Look on nutrient transport by salmon
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• Where’s the world’s biggest solar-electric power station going to be located?
• Like to forage for mushrooms? Beware the Amanita!
• Charismatic megafauna offer protection to their less appealing heterospecifics
• Without sustainability in our diets, we won’t be sustainable
• ECOmotion Studios on Hairston Smith Slobodkin and why the earth is green
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• WmD Episode #00003 has been released
• Rivers, Lakes, Seas, and Environmental Justice
• Water, Alfalfa, China, and a modern Tragedy of the Commons
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• If sloths endure costs to maintain closed-loop agricultural systems, why can’t we?
• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• Scientific American “Tiny Plants” article provides a primer on the inter-relationship between ecological and evolutionary change
• Should we emulate the cooperative and conservative habits of the sloth?
• Cooperative child-rearing pays dividends for ruffed lemurs, irrespective of kinship
• National Geographic “The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion”
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Quantifying the climate value of that 40-acre woodlot
• Production on marginal lands can meet only 25% of our biofuel mandates
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• Megan Frederickson shares the wonder of ant cooperation with Toronto Library patrons
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• The many ecotones of the Columbia Gorge
• Evolution may be too slow: British Columbia begins assisted migration of forests
• “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” exhibit at the American Museum on Natural History
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• National Geographic “Wolf Wars”
• Understanding biome-level response to climate change

Textbooks (1)

• Moving away from textbooks

The Sustainable Use of Fisheries (4)

The WmD Project (10)

• WmD Episode #00003 has been released
• WmD Episode #00002 has been released
• A niche with the masses?
• WmD Episode #00001 has been released!
• Sabbatical, Sweet Sabbatical
• The Big Questions in Ecology and Evolution
• The WmD Project has a logo
• I receive funding to initiate the WmD Project
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• Was Teilhard de Chardin the real inventor of an evolutionary approach to culture?

Tracking (1)

• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes

Traditional Ecological Knowledge (5)

• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology
• Are the Sentinelese the last untouched hunter-gatherer culture?
• ESA 2012 Symposium #23, Commodifying Nature: The Scientific Basis for Ecosystem Service Valuation in Environmental Decision Making
• Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild”
• ESA 2009 Meeting Day #2 (Monday)

Tropical Forest (8)

• If sloths endure costs to maintain closed-loop agricultural systems, why can’t we?
• Sweet Fern Productions puts Alfred Russel Wallace to paper
• Should we emulate the cooperative and conservative habits of the sloth?
• Cooperative child-rearing pays dividends for ruffed lemurs, irrespective of kinship
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Megan Frederickson shares the wonder of ant cooperation with Toronto Library patrons
• ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere

Tundra (4)

• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• National Geographic on the yartsa gunbu bubble
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Understanding biome-level response to climate change

Uncategorized (14)

• Parasites better watch out for parasites!
• Is it possible that Trump’s science-adviser is a stealth climate-change accepter?
• Is sexualization of women driven by the structure of our economy?
• Can a realistically-parameterized model tell us why our brains are so big?
• Hey, ho, Portland Oregon ESA 2017, let’s go!
• Moral Sense III approaches, June 2nd at St. Francis College
• Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2017)
• Support the mighty Bombardier Beetle’s quest to have its genome sequenced!
• Pratt Foundation teams up with Brooklyn College pyschologists to study perception and drawing
• My next Breeders, Propagators, & Creators talk: Columbia University on March 7th, 2016
• I visit Pratt’s Poetics Lab focused on play
• An eye is not an eye is not an eye
• Food is personal, sometimes ethical, but rarely political
• How do we know when people are actually happy?

Urban Ecology (26)

• Don’t blame people for being obese (blame their neighborhood)
• Wildfires driven more by lowered precipitation than elevated temperatures or reduced snowpack
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Pratt News features short piece on Dr. Roland Kays’s campus visit
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the Cat Wars
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Hedgehogs, Raccoons, and Urbanite Biophilia
• Want to know where NYC’s water supply stands? There’s a DEP page for that!
• Alternative music legend Morrissey agrees to adopt 2 million feral cats in win-win for felines, Australian native fauna
• “Science: A Candle in the Dark” podcast on Urban Ecology
• “In Defense of Plants” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on the return of five-lined skinks
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on synanthropes and urban island castaways
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
• Can good design make highways less of a problem?
• WmD Episode #00003 has been released
• WmD Episode #00002 has been released
• So much for the big-brained city bird theory?
• Urban Wildlife Podcast on big animals in big cities
• Urban tree power
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• What happens when a landscape ecologist takes on urban ecology
• There’s Dirt Under Them Thar Sidewalks
• Official video of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010
• Asian Carp on NPR
• Steven Chillrud Visit to Pratt Institute
• ESA 2009 Meeting Day #2 (Monday)

Urban Planning (9)

• Don’t blame people for being obese (blame their neighborhood)
• Wildfires driven more by lowered precipitation than elevated temperatures or reduced snowpack
• Professor Jensen’s Guide to Urban Cycling
• Interdisciplinary artist Ellie Irons to speak at Pratt Institute on November 9th
• Urban Transect Walks: helping your students see the overlap between ecological and social patterns
• Concerned about NYC’s air quality? Here’s a quick page to check…
• “Science: A Candle in the Dark” podcast on Urban Ecology
• Urbanization is not urbanization: density, not size, drives sustainability
• Can good design make highways less of a problem?

Vegetarianism (7)

• Without sustainability in our diets, we won’t be sustainable
• Concentrated factory farming of livestock massively alters the phosphorus cycle
• Freakonomics takes the quantitative knife to how we produce and consume food
• Mark Bittman on the ecological imperative of eating less meat
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• Vegans and the Quest for Sanity
• Changing and not changing the way we use our agricultural land

Visual Perception (1)

• Pratt Foundation teams up with Brooklyn College pyschologists to study perception and drawing

Water Supply (11)

• BLUE WEEK 2017 comes to Pratt Institute
• Want to know where NYC’s water supply stands? There’s a DEP page for that!
• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• Rivers, Lakes, Seas, and Environmental Justice
• Water, Alfalfa, China, and a modern Tragedy of the Commons
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• Now legal, Northern California’s pot farms join the rest of agriculture in impacting water supply
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Fracking study retracted after the discovery of a massive conflict of interest
• HOME, a documentary about the impacted Biosphere
• ESA 2009 Day #1 (Sunday)

Web (110)

• Alan Rabinowitz, 1953-2018
• “Mount H-Index”: I never made it to base camp, and I have still had some great adventures
• Who was the first to catalog color? Hint: it wasn’t designers!
• BK BioReactor visualizes Gowanus Canal microbial communities
• Pratt News features short piece on Dr. Roland Kays’s campus visit
• Want to know where NYC’s water supply stands? There’s a DEP page for that!
• My article on adolescence featured in the This View of Life culture series
• Pratt students make the potential trip to Mars better designed
• Biophotovoltaics: a promising design innovation, or a great example of lack of quantitative design?
• Is New York City a “sustainable” metropolis?
• Would a “labor economy” lead to different outcomes than the “capital economy”?
• Clever study shows how cooperative bacteria sanction — and therefore exclude — cheaters
• Can understanding cooperation lead to higher-yield crops?
• My personal experience that creationists gravitate to anything with even the faintest scent of scientific uncertainty (and what to do about it)
• Higher education teaching loads are about economics, not valuing teaching
• Jeremy Yoder on contemporary selection for increased human height
• Did the population bombers drive China into cultural crisis?
• Mist net photographs as art?
• Charismatic megafauna offer protection to their less appealing heterospecifics
• Urbanization is not urbanization: density, not size, drives sustainability
• David Sloan Wilson on how Jeff Bezos don’t know squat about chickens (or evolution!)
• New report on drug resistance highlights the tragedy of our antibiotics commons
• Open Tree of Life allows experts and novices alike to explore “the” phylogeny
• Do creative people have “messy minds”?
• Are big corporate polluters trying to “artwash” their image?
• Asymmetrical interaction best explained by superrational rather than rational strategy
• Our culture is special, but not especially uncommon
• Can good design make highways less of a problem?
• Have we outgrown the scale of cooperation supported by the Big Gods of Big Religion?
• Can we resolve the ‘group selection debate’ by focusing on human cooperation?
• On the verge of 400 ppm Carbon Dioxide: a symbolic threshold
• PCB Bioaccumulation and Polar Bear Penises
• When Facebook performs a manipulative experiment on its users, the results are interesting, the methods disturbing
• Ben Knight’s “Phyletic gradualism / Punctuated equilibrium”
• A nice synopsis of some reasons for laughter
• Choosing a more sustainable web host
• EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available
• Apparently I should stop holding my breath for the Google Translate “dolphin” module
• 0.5% to 3%: Do we now have a better sense of what makes people smart?
• David Haig suggests that babies cry at night to prevent siblings
• Interesting numbers on the sustainability (or lack thereof) of the aviation industry
• CNN tackles climate change by explaining public goods games!
• Nice infographic on global and domestic food waste
• New research suggests that chimpanzees understand that cooperation produces benefits
• Microbes may surf their way to successful cooperation
• Open Access publishing and “peer review” fail the test of a well-designed hoax
• An amazing indictment of the academic publishing industry (in which most of us participate)
• Should we emulate the cooperative and conservative habits of the sloth?
• Recognizing the difference between what the big and small educational institutions offer
• More press for paper that de-bunks the zero determinant superiority
• Cooperative child-rearing pays dividends for ruffed lemurs, irrespective of kinship
• Sarah Coakley on the connection between theology and evolutionary theory
• US EPA’s EnviroAtlas project promises to give researchers, students new insights into the geography of ecosystem services
• Ever wonder about the swimming pattern of sperm?
• The potential for human evolution has increased along with the population size of our species
• Up-Goer Five text editor challenges you to make accessible explanations
• Dog license dataset opens up huge potential for understanding the dog-human mutualism
• Montreal art installation rewards cooperative play with musical novelty
• Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
• Slate article explores the big brain, big society connection
• Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
• Want to know where the Presidential candidates stand on science? There’s a site for that!
• International Symposium honors the work of Lynn Margulis
• Freeman Dyson calls the Prisoner’s Dilemma “an amusing toy”
• David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and the delusion of a world without tradeoffs
• Think that the DNA transfer is only from parents to offspring? Think again!
• Can playing games make the world a better place?
• Can proper education allow reputation to foster action on climate change?
• What’s ironic is that the creationists do not realize that we evolutionists might be trying to understand their success
• Agent-based modeling instead of game theory: I agree!
• Climate and Clean Air Coalition unites air pollution concerns
• Reductions in fertilizer use are now worth carbon credits
• Despite great press for Dyson, the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is still not the solution to human cooperation
• Rachel Carson still under attack for bringing her values to bear on her science
• Bacterial societies defy selfish gene predictions
• Call it “ethnocentrism” or the “green beard effect”, “tags” assist cooperation
• Sometimes our simulations have more to tell than we first see
• Peter Turchin on Steven Pinker’s “Grand Deception” hypotheses
• Steven Pinker makes it clear that he is not a “group selectionist”
• Once again Jerry Coyne goes ad hominem to defend evolutionary orthodoxy
• Prominent evolutionary biologists weigh in on whether humans can evolve into a ‘superorganism’
• Is this what free-market conservation looks like?
• Interesting reports from the Consilience Conference
• Do you need cooperation in your model to explain why there are more right-handed people?
• Is a comic movie about getting a Ph.D. revealing of some scientific tragedies?
• Kandyan dwarf toad removes itself from the IUCN Red List
• Brian Czech warns ecologists against drinking the “sustainable growth Koolaid”
• Peacocks communicate via the (ultra)sounds they make with their feathers
• Our brains are too smart to be tricked: diet sodas just make your body crave more calories
• In case you were a skeptic: bears can count
• Big felines have lots of commensal fans
• Bonobo sequence establishes that humans are equally but dissimilarly related to our chimpanzee relatives
• Vampire bats: the ideal organism for studying cooperation?
• David Sloan Wilson on Richard Dawkins on E.O. Wilson
• Larry Arnhart reviews E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”
• S.E. Gould takes on sloppy use of the selfish gene metaphor
• UCS “Cooler Smarter” footprint calculator promotes lower carbon behaviors
• I knew that dog was watching me: Jennifer Verdolin confirms my worst fears
• If you don’t think that culture can make us do maladaptive things, check out “trepanning”
• BBC covers the up side of the North Pacific plastic “garbage patch”
• Olivia Judson reviews Mark Pagel’s “Wired for Culture”
• Is the European Union going rogue or playing altruist on airline emissions?
• Howard Rheingold TED talk urges a global movement to study cooperation
• Naturalistic Fallacy: 1, Sam Harris: 0
• How the right wing co-opts research into the evolution of cooperation
• Martin Nowak lecture on The Evolution of Cooperation at MIT
• Economics and Human Satisfaction
• NY Times way behind the times on Nature versus Nurture
• Using Ecological Footprints to Teach Sustainability
• Firefighting and the Tragedy of the Commons

Web Design (6)

• NYC Solar Map: a powerful tool for transformation to a solar future
• The Altruist theme is live and done on this site
• The New Theme is nearly permanent
• Back to the old theme
• New theme in development for this site
• Do we need to delete to keep the web sustainable?

Wild Foods (2)

• Science & Sustainability at the Green Meadow Waldorf School
• Cod gone on Cape Cod

WordPress (2)

• My personal experience that creationists gravitate to anything with even the faintest scent of scientific uncertainty (and what to do about it)
• Is this site good enough to clone?