Posted 15 Feb 2016 / 0
Urban Wildlife Podcast “Bonus Episode: Pier 53 Skinks” Perpetually behind, I finally checked out the final Urban Wildlife Podcast “Bonus Episode“, posted last October as the final episode of Season 1. This is a great finale to the first season of this offbeat, fun podcast that looks at urban wildlife through the lens of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Solely focused Read More
A Minor Post, Biodiversity Loss, Commensalism, Conservation Biology, Ecological Restoration, Habitat Destruction, Habitat Fragmentation, Invasive Species, Mutualism, Predation, Public Policy, Radio & Podcasts, Urban Ecology
Posted 29 Jan 2016 / 0
As I have been working on my book-in-progress (Breeders, Propagators, & Creators), I have encountered a difficult-to-answer question of road-block proportions: how do we quantify cultural transmission? The focus of my book is the tradeoff humans face between making babies, spreading existing culture, and inventing new ideas. If such a tradeoff exists, we need to be able Read More
A Major Post, Behavior, Belief, Books, Breeders, Propagators, & Creators, Communication, Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Evolution, Emotion, Gene-Culture Coevolution, Memetic Fitness, Parenting, Psychology, Religion, Sexual Conflict, Sociology
Posted 16 Jan 2016 / 0
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons National Geographic “Inside the Eye: Nature’s Most Exquisite Creation” This is another fantastic article by Ed Yong that very nicely captures the relativistic nature of the evolutionary process. We basically call any light-sensing organ an “eye”, but animals have eyes that perform radically different functions. How eyes work is a function Read More
A Minor Post, Adaptation, Articles, Convergence, Divergence, Fossil Data, Interactions, Photography, Uncategorized
Posted 15 Jan 2016 / 0
Image courtesy of Nick Gray via Wikimedia Commons The Chronicle of Higher Education “The Vegetarian Lesson” This article by Chad Lavin neatly distills ideas and issues that I have been grappling with for more than half my life. As a current-day ecologist who was a vegetarian more than a decade before I took my first ecology course, Read More
A Minor Post, Anthropogenic Change, Articles, Behavior, Belief, Cooperation, Food, Parasitism, Political Science, Predation, Public Policy, Resource Consumption, Uncategorized
Posted 15 Jan 2016 / 0
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons Science “Conservatives report, but liberals display, greater happiness” This paper was published back in March, but I just discovered it. I am somewhat fascinated by psychological studies of happiness, because happiness is so hard to pin down. What is happiness, and can we rely on people to accurately report how Read More
A Minor Post, Articles, Behavior, Belief, Data Limitation, Emotion, Happiness, Psychology, Uncategorized
Posted 14 Jan 2016 / 0
Brooklyn garbage bag photo courtesy of Tom W. Sulcer via Wikimedia Commons New York City has endured a pretty bad environmental reputation for decades. If you find yourself on a Manhattan street on the right warm summer night, it is hard not to feel that the place is an environmental nightmare. Those piles of garbage Read More
A Major Post, Anthropogenic Change, Articles, Climate Change, MSCI-271, Ecology for Architects, Pollution, Quantitative Analysis, Resource Consumption, Sustainability, Sustainable Transportation, Sustainable Urban Design, Web
Posted 13 Jan 2016 / 0
People’s Climate Change March photo courtesy of South Bend Voice via Wikimedia Commons There’s a really important new paper out entitled “A multilevel evolutionary framework for sustainability analysis“, due to be published in the journal Ecology and Society. Although it is not yet published, you can check out a pre-print via Michelle Kline’s site. (UPDATE: Read More
A Minor Post, Articles, Cultural Evolution, Multilevel Selection, Social Norms, Sustainability
Posted 12 Jan 2016 / 0
Hurt Apple image by Nina Matthews courtesy of Wikimedia Commons Although of course I would never sanction such behavior, it appears that a farcical medical research article has gone virally awry. The article, Maternal kisses are not effective in alleviating minor childhood injuries (boo-boos): a randomized, controlled and blinded study, was published in late December. Read More
A Minor Post, Articles, Belief, Ethics, Methods, Scientific Fraud
Posted 11 Jan 2016 / 0
Evonomics “A Simple Way to Decrease Income Inequality” I am intrigued by the idea that measurements of economic success impact our economic decisions and therefore our economic outcomes. A persistent obsession with capital has created an economic system that responds to capital. But what if employment condition — “labor” — was the fundamental unit of Read More
A Minor Post, Belief, Cultural Evolution, Economic sustainability, Economics, Ethics, Political Science, Public Policy, Social Norms, Web
Posted 08 Jan 2016 / 0
ScienceDaily “Cooperating bacteria isolate cheaters” This kind of study is where the field exploring how cooperation evolves should be headed: model predictions are verified by actual microbial microcosms, but the interactions of those microcosms are manipulated by genetically-engineering variation in behavior (what this article calls “synthetic ecology”). This approach helps overcome a common problem faced Read More
A Minor Post, Altruism, Competition, Cooperation, Methods, Microbial Ecology, Partner Choice, Reciprocity, Web
