Posted 10 Apr 2011 / 0
Recently, Scientific American‘s “Science Talk” podcast featured a valuable interview with Johns Hopkins School of Medicine researcher Kathleen Barnes called “Can It Be Bad to Be Too Clean?: The Hygiene Hypothesis“. In the interview, Dr. Barnes explained the state of contemporary research into the “Hygiene Hypothesis”, which suggests that the reason we are seeing an Read More
Coevolution, Host-Pathogen Evolution, Mismatch theory, Radio & Podcasts
Posted 07 Apr 2011 / 0
Today’s episode of Fresh Air with Terry Gross featured a nice interview with Ellen Prager, a marine biologist who just published a book entitled Sex, Drugs, and Sea Slime: The Oceans’ Oddest Creatures and Why They Matter. The Fresh Air segment, “Under the Sea, Sex Is Slimy Business“, covered a number of really interesting marine Read More
Marine Ecosystems, Radio & Podcasts, Sex and Reproduction
Posted 01 Apr 2011 / 0
This week Pratt’s Envirolutions club took its campaign for waste reduction on campus to the annual Green Week celebration. Tabling for two days, the club had two main projects. The first was a continuation of a campaign kicked off earlier in the semester to promote CulinArt’s Green Container program and other sustainable cafeteria initiatives. The Read More
Envirolutions, Food, Resource Consumption, Sustainability, Sustainable Pratt
Posted 23 Mar 2011 / 0
Rebecca Solnit’s 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster is a book about recent human history. But for those interested in human evolution, this history is essential reading. The primary idea of the book is that our dramatic portrayals of how people react to disaster are wrong: rather Read More
Altruism, Books, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Ethics, Evolutionary Psychology, History, Human Evolution, Human Nature, Mismatch theory, Reciprocity
Posted 13 Mar 2011 / 0
No one denies that contemporary human beings cooperate extensively with non-kin. This social behavior sets us apart from even our closest primate relatives, who tend to only display strong cooperative behaviors with kin. But explaining this difference is no easy task: modern culture exerts such a strong influence on our behavior that it is easy Read More
Articles, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Group Selection, Human Evolution, Kin Selection, Mismatch theory
Posted 03 Mar 2011 / 0
The process of cultural evolution fascinates me. It is still a topic that I need to research further, but I think about it often. My Human Evolution course is steeped pretty heavily in the idea that culture as well as biology has evolved in Homo sapiens, and we talk briefly about how culture might evolve. Read More
Cultural Evolution, Speciation
Posted 14 Feb 2011 / 0
Like many educational institutions, Pratt contracts with an outside vendor to provide its cafeteria services. Our vendor is CulinArt, which operates Pratt’s main cafeteria, the Pie Shop, and a series of smaller food stands across campus. If you want to cater an event on Pratt’s campus, CulinArt also provides these services. Since I joined the Read More
Center for Sustainable Design Studies, Envirolutions, Food, Resource Consumption, Sustainability
Posted 12 Feb 2011 / 0
Today is the day widely celebrated as Darwin Day. Two hundred and two years ago, Charles Darwin was born, and many evolution enthusiasts hold rallies and teach-ins to celebrate this anniversary every year. And while my role as a college professor teaching a great variety of evolution courses ought to put me in a celebratory Read More
Belief, Evolution, Evolution Education, Public Outreach, Religion, Teaching
Posted 20 Jan 2011 / 7
In a recent posting I discussed the book The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod [1, 2]. The book chronicles Axelrod’s work in the 1980’s to understand the dynamics of the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD), which is perhaps the most well-known of game theory constructs. Axelrod’s work is important because it points out how rich Read More
Cooperation, Easy Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, Educational Software and Apps, Evolution Education, Evolutionary Modeling, Game Theory, Individual-based Models, Lesson Ideas, Reciprocity, Spatially Explicit Modeling, System Stability, Teaching, Teaching Tools
Posted 20 Jan 2011 / 0
This month’s edition of Scientific American features a cover article entitled “Dawn of the Deed” by John A. Long. Long describes how fossil discoveries he and his colleagues made several years ago have changed the way we understand the evolution of copulation. While there has long been evidence that the sharks have practiced internal fertilization Read More
Adaptation, Paleonotology, Sex and Reproduction
