Students work on the Collective Biome Visions activity in one of my Ecology classes Today my first sabbatical, a semester off from teaching, is finally coming to an end. As soon as I was granted a sabbatical I knew that this day would come a lot sooner than I could imagine, and of course it Read More
A Major Post, Higher Education, MSCI-260, Evolution, MSCI-271, Ecology for Architects, TeachingBrooklyn 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, WebGreat NPR piece here on how new technologies in personalized DNA testing have the potential to broadly expand our understanding of human relatedness. I am particularly interested in the idea that these tests further reinforce previous research showing just how much of our gene pool is shared globally rather than locally. While these tests are Read More
A Minor Post, Breeders, Propagators, & Creators, Cultural Anthropology, Genetics, Human Evolution, MSCI-362, The Evolution of Sex, Radio & Podcasts, Sex and Reproduction, Sexual CompetitionOnly Human “Your Brain on Sound” This is a great feature that uses the experience of a particular person (“Rose”) to explain how important the brain’s filtering of sound stimuli is to our perception of sound. Rose suffers from auditory neuropathy, which prevents her brain from responding to sound with neural synchrony. This makes it really Read More
A Minor Post, Minor in Sound & Music Studies, MSCI-363, Biological Origins of Sound & Music, Radio & Podcasts, Sound PerceptionThe Chronicle of Higher Education “An Unevolved View of Gender Evolution” Although I am sympathetic to a number of the critiques of traditional sexual selection theory, I have to agree with the overall thrust of this book review: if you are going to shine a critical light on scientific understandings of sex differences in humans, Read More
A Minor Post, Articles, Ethics, MSCI-362, The Evolution of Sex, Sex and Reproduction, Sexual Conflict, Sexual SelectionImage courtesy of Pacific Southwest Region of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service via Wikimedia Commons The Chronicle of Higher Education “Ecomodernists Spark Rhetorical Heat” In my Ecology for Architects course I have students work on an activity that asks them to advocate one of four “extreme” environmental positions: Population bombers; Neo-luddites; Deep ecologists; or Read More
A Minor Post, Activism, Anthropogenic Change, Articles, Environmental Justice, MSCI-271, Ecology for Architects, Public Policy, Resource Consumption, Risk & Uncertainty, Sustainability, Sustainable Agriculture, Sustainable Energy, Sustainable Transportation, Sustainable Urban DesignPLoS ONE “Probing the Strength of Infants’ Preference for Helpers over Hinderers: Two Replication Attempts of Hamlin and Wynn (2011)” Great example of how studies need to be replicated! I am wondering if funding agencies should reserve particular lines for replication studies. Does this kind of funding opportunity exist?
A Minor Post, Altruism, Articles, Behavior, Cooperation, Development, Empathy, MSCI-463, The Evolution of CooperationarXiv “Toy model for the adaptive origins of the sexual orientation continuum” This is an interesting idea that definitely bears further exploration, but by my reading of the math, the tradeoff here (what’s good for the species in having trait diversity versus what’s good for an individual in achieving reproductive success) is expressed purely in Read More
A Minor Post, Articles, Evolutionary Modeling, MSCI-362, The Evolution of Sex, Sex and ReproductionImage from PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences “Topography of social touching depends on emotional bonds between humans” (Suvilehto et al. 2015) This is a really clever study in that it aggregates a lot of data that is collected rather efficiently from a lot of participants. This makes the results robust for this Read More
A Minor Post, Articles, Behavior, Behavioral Ecology, Communication, Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Evolution, Human Nature, MSCI-362, The Evolution of Sex, Social Networks, Social NormsThere have been a lot of evolutionary psychology experiments that have tried to define both female and male attractiveness to the opposite sex, an indirect way to get at the nature of sexual selection in humans. A new study published in Behavioral Ecology reminds us that sexual selection is not the only process that has Read More
A Minor Post, Articles, Behavior, Behavioral Ecology, Communication, Evolutionary Psychology, Human Uniqueness, MSCI-362, The Evolution of Sex, Psychological Adaptation, Quantifying Costs and Benefits, Reputation, Sex and Reproduction, Sexual Competition, Sexual Selection