-
Free teaching tools
Recent Major Posts
- Pratt Institute holds 124th Commencement, special gallery show
- Rhett Bradbury’s Master’s Thesis explores how gaming can foster political leadership
- Envirolutions asks the Pratt community to identify where there is “room for improvement”
- My review of Railsback and Grimm’s “Agent-based and individual-based modeling” textbook published in Ecology
- Envirolutions club launches its “Room for Improvement” campaign
- Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
- Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
- Pratt Envirolutions Students Bring Recycling Bins to Campus
- Concept mapping as a creative tool
- Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
Recent Minor Posts
- Pratt Professor Ágnes Mócsy releases “Smashing Matters” short film
- NPR piece suggests that economics are pushing us towards nutrient recycling
- Just in case you missed it the first ten times: E.O. Wilson likes group selection, Jerry Coyne does not
- Allen MacNeill predicts resolution of Ev-Coop debates
- Martin Nowak to lecture on the compatibility of god and the evolutionary process
- Understanding kin selection and reciprocity when strategies are culturally propagated
- “Earth Hour” seeks to re-focus our attention on all the earth provides
- Seth Horowitz on our perception of sound
- Forward on Climate Rally seeks to shift the national dialogue on anthropogenic climate change
- Quantifying the climate value of that 40-acre woodlot
-
What I am reading now
Yearly Archives: 2010
Is the “hopelessly incomplete” fossil record a little better than we give it credit for?
Conventional wisdom has always been that fossils are impressionistic: although they can tell us a lot about the morphology of a great variety of organic structures, it has been assumed that all but the most recent of fossil remains contain … Continue reading
Saving Puffins, One Clip at a Time
There’s an interesting article in a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “A Path for Puffins“. The article discusses the campaign to help eradicate an invasive plant species from a somewhat-remote Scottish Island that is home to … Continue reading
Man or astrobiology man?
This month’s Scientific American had two interesting news stories concerning our scientific obsession with space. The first article, entitled “Defying Politics”, discussed the schizophrenic and wavering manner in which the last two presidential administrations have worked to forge our future … Continue reading
Posted in Astrobiology, Space Travel
Tagged Manned Space Travel is Stupid!, Scientific American
Leave a comment
Extensifying Sustainability
The Chronicle of Higher Education featured a provocative article entitled “True Sustainability Means Going Beyond Campus Boundaries” in last week’s issue. Author James Proctor argues that campus sustainability has focused too much on the “act locally” principle, leading to sustainable … Continue reading
Mirsky on Poop in Space
As an ecologist one of my biggest pet peeves is the way that manned space travel is treated in the mainstream media, both fictional and non-fictional. Without going deeply into the details, suffice it to say that our dependence on … Continue reading
Using Ecological Footprints to Teach Sustainability
Technically- and traditionally-speaking, an ecology course should not really deal too much with policy. A strict definition of ecology should limit the topic to the study of the interaction between organisms and their environment, and for decades now that has … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropogenic Change, Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, Ecological Footprinting, Ecology Education, Ecosystem Services, Environmental Justice, Ethics, MSCI-270, Ecology, Pollution, Public Policy, Quantitative Analysis, Sustainability, Teaching Tools, Web
Tagged American Public Media, Consumer Consequences, Redefining Progress
1 Comment
Reclaiming a Rigorous Definition of “Sustainability”
The latest issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment features a great guest editorial by David N. Laband and David B. South entitled “Walking the talk on sustainability”. In this short piece, Laband and South make a point that … Continue reading
Are Eco-labels an Effective Tool for Conservation?
On of the things that I like about the Ecological Society of America’s “accessible” journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment is that it always contains an eclectic mix of articles. The November 2010 issue contains an article entitled “Strategic … Continue reading
Official video of the International Year of Biodiversity 2010
One of my current Ecology students brought this video, produced by the United Nations, to my attention today: I think what is most fascinating about this video is the premise upon which it is built. Using the video screen to … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropogenic Change, Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, Conservation Biology, Ecology, Ecology Education, Ecosystem Services, Environmental Justice, Extinction, Film & Television, Invasive Species, Pollution, Public Policy, Sustainability, Urban Ecology
Tagged Convention on Biodiversity, United Nations, YouTube
Leave a comment
Delayed Development and Human Evolution
For hundreds of thousands of years, Homo neanderthalensis was the dominant hominid species of Europe and the Middle East. Then, somewhere in the range of 80,000 to 50,000 years ago, modern humans (Homo sapiens) expanded out of Africa and came … Continue reading
Greg Graffin on The Takeaway
Back in the early 1990’s, I could be found skateboarding around the campus of Pomona College. As I rolled my way from the dining hall to those eight o’clock classes in Chemistry that served to weed out potential Biology majors … Continue reading
Posted in Evolution, Music, Radio & Podcasts, Religion, Reviews
Tagged Greg Graffin, hardcorepunk, Public Radio International, Richard Dawkins, The Takeway, WNYC
Leave a comment
Scientific American “Controlling the Brain with Light”
Neuroscience represents a sort of “last frontier” in biology: despite decades of research into the nervous systems of a diverse set of organisms, scientific understanding of how the web of neurons we call a brain creates complex emergent patterns of … Continue reading
The Role of Technology in Human Evolution
Today’s version of The Takeaway featured an interesting interview with Kevin Kelly, author of a new book called What Technology Wants. You can listen to the segment here: Although I have not read the book, I am familiar and interested … Continue reading
National Geographic’s “Science of Dogs”
I have a rather ambitious list of courses that I want to offer in the near future. As I have indicated before, one of the liberating features of my job as a professor at Pratt Institute is that pretty much … Continue reading
Posted in Animal Domestication, Courses, Cultural Evolution, Ethics, Evolution, Film & Television, Human Evolution, Mutualism, Reviews, Teaching
Tagged Canids
Leave a comment
2010 Convention on Biological Diversity and Ecosystem Services (Sorta)
There was an interesting piece today on Public Radio International‘s The World about the Convention on Biological Diversity (taking place in Japan) called “Environment Biodiversity as natural capital“. Guest Thomas Lovejoy talks about various examples of natural capital, including the … Continue reading
Robert Trivers and colleagues on Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson’s “The evolution of eusociality”
One of the most difficult things about being the only full-time biologist on the Pratt Institute campus is that I do not have the opportunity to discuss serious science in my field with colleagues or guest speakers. To help alleviate … Continue reading
Posted in Adaptation, Altruism, Articles, Behavioral Ecology, Cooperation, Data Limitation, Evolution, Game Theory, Group Selection, Human Evolution, Multilevel Selection, Sociology, Superorganisms, Talks & Seminars
Tagged Corina E. Tarnita, David Sloan Wilson, Edward O. Wilson, George C. Williams, H. Allen Orr, Jerry Coyne, Martin A. Nowak, Nature magazine, Richard Dawkins, Robert Trivers, Rutgers University
13 Comments
Firefighting and the Tragedy of the Commons
A recent incident in Obion County, Tennessee has gotten national media attention from the likes of MSNBC, NPR, The Huffington Post, and The New York Times. A resident of this rural county called 911 when a fire broke out in … Continue reading
Posted in Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Ethics, Evolutionary Psychology, Film & Television, MSCI-463, The Evolution of Cooperation, Multilevel Selection, Public Policy, Punishment, Radio & Podcasts, Web
Tagged Community Goods & Services, Firefighting, Huffington Post, MSNBC, National Public Radio, NYTimes, Punishment, Tragedy of the Commons
Leave a comment
Asian Carp on NPR
Today National Public Radio‘s All Things Considered featured a good piece on the Asian Carp problem entitled “White House ‘Asian Carp Czar’ Outlines His Strategy For Eradicating Species“. The story explains how two human actions — the importation of carp … Continue reading
National Geographic “Wolf Wars”
In the March 2010 issue of National Geographic there’s an excellent article on the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park entitled “Wolf Wars”. I was excited to discover it because I use the example of how wolves were brought … Continue reading
