Posted 10 Jan 2011 / 0
I just finished reading Robert Axelrod’s seminal book entitled The Evolution of Cooperation. Although I had read a lot about Axelrod’s work and am quite familiar with the body of literature that it inspired, I had never actually read his book cover to cover. Going in, my expectation was of finding a rather primitive treatment Read More
Altruism, Behavioral Ecology, Books, Coevolution, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Evolution, Evolutionary Modeling, Game Theory, Human Evolution, Individual-based Models, Interdisciplinarity, Multilevel Selection, Mutualism, Political Science, Public Policy, Reciprocity, Sociology, Spatially Explicit Modeling
Posted 07 Jan 2011 / 0
John C. Avise [1, 2] started off the colloquium by giving a very brief introduction to the In the Light of Evolution series, highlighting much of the history I discussed in my preview. Peter Nonacs “Insect Societies: Pinnacles of Cooperation” Nonacs began his talk by giving it an additional subtitle: “peaks of runaway niceness”. His Read More
Conferences, Cooperation, Evolution, Talks & Seminars
Posted 04 Jan 2011 / 0
In a couple of days I will be attending the In the Light of Evolution V: Cooperation colloquium, and in preparation I have been reviewing the work of the featured speakers. Tomorrow, I will be posting a preview of the meeting. The meeting promises to be broad and interdisciplinary. It also features a very elite Read More
Conferences, Cooperation, Social Network Analysis
Posted 13 Oct 2010 / 16
One of the most difficult things about being the only full-time biologist on the Pratt Institute campus is that I do not have the opportunity to discuss serious science in my field with colleagues or guest speakers. To help alleviate this problem, I have my friends who are at serious research institutions on the lookout Read More
Adaptation, Altruism, Articles, Behavioral Ecology, Cooperation, Data Limitation, Evolution, Game Theory, Group Selection, Human Evolution, Multilevel Selection, Sociology, Superorganisms, Talks & Seminars
Posted 09 Oct 2010 / 0
A recent incident in Obion County, Tennessee has gotten national media attention from the likes of MSNBC, NPR, The Huffington Post, and The New York Times. A resident of this rural county called 911 when a fire broke out in his yard, but was told that he would not receive a response from the local Read More
Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Ethics, Evolutionary Psychology, Film, Television, & Video, MSCI-463, The Evolution of Cooperation, Multilevel Selection, Public Policy, Punishment, Radio & Podcasts, Web
Posted 03 Oct 2010 / 0
I am on the lookout for a new textbook for my non-majors Evolution course, so I was excited to check out Carl Zimmer’s new book “The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution”, published this year by Roberts and Company. For those of you who are not familiar with Carl Zimmer’s work, he is a prolific Read More
Adaptation, Animal Domestication, Books, Coevolution, DNA Barcoding, Evolution, Evolution Education, Evolutionary Modeling, Evolutionary Psychology, Human Evolution, MSCI-260, Evolution, Multilevel Selection, Phylogenetics
Posted 15 Sep 2010 / 0
George C. Williams, eminent scholar of evolutionary biology, died on September 8th at the age of 84. During the second half of the twentieth century, Williams emerged as one of the most influential thinkers in evolutionary biology, and helped to clarify a number of key issues in the field. His defining style was to tackle Read More
Adaptation, Biography, Evolution, Group Selection, Obituary, Senescence
Posted 09 Sep 2010 / 3
I just started a new semester of The Evolution of Cooperation, a class that I taught for the first time in the Fall of 2008 and was shelved for a couple of years while I worked on developing other new courses. Now I am excited to get back to the initial framework I laid out Read More
Cooperation, Evolution, Evolution Education, Game Theory, Lesson Ideas, MSCI-463, The Evolution of Cooperation
Posted 10 Jun 2010 / 0
Awhile back I read Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and more recently I finished David Sloan Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedral. Both books provide a view on religion from the perspective of a prominent evolutionary biologist, and the contrast between these views tells us a lot about the culture of evolutionary biology as well as the nature Read More
Evolution, Group Selection, Human Evolution, Multilevel Selection, Religion, Reviews
Posted 07 Jun 2010 / 0
Gene Kritsky is a renowned bee biologist, so when I learned that he had written The Quest for the Perfect Hive: A History of Innovation in Bee Culture, I rushed to get ahold of it. I am very interested in species that form superorganisms (bees, wasps, ants, naked mole-rats, humans), and I have been slowly Read More
Animal Domestication, Books, Coevolution, Cultural Evolution, Reviews, Superorganisms
