Posted 14 Mar 2016 / 0
There’s an interesting article about professorial fashion published in Vitae today. Written by Ben Barry and entitled “Fashion Matters“, this short piece explores how professors have traditionally expressed their being “above fashion” by wearing either very predictable or very boring clothing. Barry claims that there’s a lot of under-utilized potential in the professorial wardrobe. He suggests that Read More
A Minor Post, Fashion, Higher Education, Resource Consumption, Sustainability, Teaching
Posted 18 Feb 2016 / 0
Last week I had the privilege of being a guest of Pratt’s Poetics Lab course, whose focus this semester is on play behavior. The course involves a number of different faculty and hosts a bevy of guests but is the brainchild of course coordinator Ira Livingston. My job was to introduce the biological and evolutionary approach to understanding Read More
A Major Post, Adaptation, Evolution, Evolution Education, Human Evolution, Human Uniqueness, Play, Pratt Institute, Uncategorized
Posted 01 Feb 2016 / 0
Image of the Oxeye Daisy courtesy of Dan F. Myers via Wikimedia Commons Sometimes the web seems better than it actually is. After about three decades of people adding content non-stop to the free internet, you would figure that it would be relatively easy to find well-written, accurate articles on basic concepts in ecology. But Read More
A Minor Post, Eco 101, Ecology, Public Outreach
Posted 01 Feb 2016 / 1
Image of what happens to architecture when civilization disappears courtesy of Michael Zawadski via Wikimedia Commons I always end up hearing the question at some point in the semester: why do architects have to take a course that provides in-depth understanding of ecology and environmental science? Implied undercurrents to this basic question include a slew of other Read More
A Minor Post, Architecture, Department of Mathematics & Science, Ecology, Ecology Education, MSCI-271, Ecology for Architects, Pratt Institute, Sustainability, Teaching
Posted 25 Jan 2016 / 0
Fundamentally, carrying capacity is a measure of the maximum density of a particular population How many organisms of a particular species can an area support? What determines this maximum population density? The answer to these questions is captured by the ecological concept of carrying capacity. The carrying capacity tells us how many organisms of a particular species Read More
A Major Post, Carrying Capacity, Eco 101, MSCI-270, Ecology, MSCI-271, Ecology for Architects
Posted 18 Jan 2016 / 0
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, Teaching
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 06 Jan 2016 / 0
Great 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 Competition
Posted 04 Dec 2015 / 0
Next Friday, December 11th, at 3 pm I will be delivering a talk at St. Francis College entitled “Highly-creative baby-breeding idea propagators: what human (re)productive choices mean for the future of our species“. The talk is a synopsis of a large section of my book-in-progress Breeders, Propagators, & Creators: Culture, Biology, and the Future of Human Evolution. Read More
A Major Post, Behavior, Breeders, Propagators, & Creators, Carrying Capacity, Cultural Evolution, Evolution Education, Gene-Culture Coevolution, Human Evolution, Human Uniqueness, Intrinsic Growth Rate, Memetic Fitness, Natural Selection, Parenting, Population Growth, Public Outreach, Reproductive Fitness, Sex and Reproduction, Social Diversity
Posted 03 Dec 2015 / 0
Only 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 Perception
