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 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
