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 12 Jan 2016 / 0
One of the ideas that I am exploring in my work-in-progress book Breeders, Propagators, & Creators is that human beings face a fundamental trade-off between three activities: Breeding: behaviors that lead to the production of offpsring (which might — but does not necessarily — include parenting); Propagating: behaviors that spread existing cultural ideas; and Creating: behaviors that introduce Read More
A Major Post, Behavior, Breeders, Propagators, & Creators, Cultural Evolution, Data Limitation, Gene-Culture Coevolution, Human Evolution, Hypothesis Testing, Memetic Fitness, Reproductive Fitness, Sex and Reproduction, Sociology
Posted 22 Dec 2015 / 0
Last month, I published a rather long review of William Provine’s last book, The “Random Genetic Drift” Fallacy. The book is pretty obscure and I knew that a lot of other evolutionary biologists had dismissed the book as being a bit on the crazy side, so in the back of my mind I was wondering whether Read More
A Major Post, Belief, Creationism, Data Limitation, Evolution, Fluidity of Knowledge, Hypothesis Testing, Natural Selection, Population Genetics, Web, WordPress
Posted 03 Dec 2015 / 0
National Public Radio “In Worst Attacks, Terrorists Often Have Fraternal Bonds” This is an interesting — albeit brief — piece on a recent “pattern” that has emerged in terror attacks: teams of attackers are often composed of blood relatives. As a good scientist I have to point out that there’s a danger here of over-generalizing Read More
A Major Post, Activism, Behavior, Behavioral Ecology, Belief, Breeders, Propagators, & Creators, Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Evolution, Data Limitation, Gene by Environment Interactions, Gene-Culture Coevolution, Genetics, Host-Pathogen Evolution, Human Evolution, Memetic Fitness, Mismatch theory, Phenotypic Plasticity, Public Policy, Radio & Podcasts, Resistance Evolution in Parasites, Social Diversity
Posted 20 Sep 2015 / 0
Urban Wildlife Podcast “Episode 4: Cats and Coyotes” What I really enjoyed about this particular episode of the Urban Wildlife Podcast was the interaction between topics covered. The effects of both cats and coyotes are still largely unknown, even as both animals are fairly common in urban areas. Domesticated cats are pretty easy to track Read More
A Minor Post, Animal Domestication, Behavior, Behavioral Ecology, Birds, Canids, Coevolution, Conservation Biology, Data Limitation, Felids, Habitat Fragmentation, Methods, Predation, Radio & Podcasts, Temperate Forest, Tracking, Urban Ecology
Posted 30 May 2014 / 0
For the past couple of years I have been playing around with a really cool tool called EnviroAtlas, a project of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. This past semester I created two classroom activities that use EnviroAtlas, implementing them for the first time in my Ecology for Architects course. The EnviroAtlas tool was in beta-testing Read More
A Minor Post, Biodiversity Loss, Biomes, Bogs & Wetlands, Citizen Science, Computer Science, Conservation Biology, Data Limitation, Deserts, Ecosystem Services, Education, Educational Software and Apps, Environmental Justice, Eutrophication, Grasslands, Habitat Destruction, Invasive Species, Long Term Ecological Research, Macroecology, Pollution, Ponds & Lakes, Population Pressure, Public Policy, Quantitative Analysis, Rivers & Streams, Sustainability, Teaching, Teaching Tools, Temperate Forest, Temperate Rainforest, Urban Ecology, Water Supply, Web
Posted 17 Mar 2014 / 0
The Chronicle of Higher Education “Animal Magnetism” I still think that we would be appalled and offended if we could literally read the inner emotional dialogue of a cat, but I have to agree with the main contention of Barash and Lipton: that animals have feelings and connections with each other — and sometimes with Read More
A Minor Post, Articles, Behavior, Behavioral Ecology, Belief, Consciousness, Data Limitation, Divergence, Emotion, Fluidity of Knowledge, Hypothesis Testing, Neuroscience
Posted 25 Jan 2014 / 0
NPR Morning Edition “When Big Carnivores Go Down, Even Vegetarians Take The Hit” Science “Status and Ecological Effects of the World’s Largest Carnivores” Both of these articles are great for introducing the idea of trophic cascades as well as how trophic inefficiency implies that large predators require large ranges containing abundant prey.
A Minor Post, Articles, Biodiversity Loss, Community Ecology, Conservation Biology, Data Limitation, Ecological Modeling, Keystone Species, Long Term Ecological Research, Predation, Radio & Podcasts
Posted 25 Oct 2013 / 0
The New York Times “Skull Fossil Suggests Simpler Human Lineage” It is interesting how terrible fossils are: generally, they represent only a part of one individual who was part of one population in one place at one point in time. Not the best data ever! So when some predator(s) on hominids dumps five carcasses in the Read More
A Minor Post, Data Limitation, Homo species, Human Evolution
Posted 19 Jun 2012 / 0
PLoS One “Mine, Yours, Ours? Sharing Data on Human Genetic Variation” This problem reminds me a little bit of a similar problem in computational biology: often modelers are reluctant to share their code, considering it proprietary information (although note that code represents “methods” and sequences represent “results”). But if gene sequences and model code are Read More
A Minor Post, Data Limitation, Genetics
