Christopher X J. Jensen
Associate Professor, Pratt Institute

Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2017)

Posted 08 May 2017 / 2

One of the activities that I regularly have my students complete in my Evolution course is called “Future Evolution“. The activity sends students on what most evolutionary biologists consider a fool’s errand: to try to predict the future evolution of some particular trait in some particular species. Making such predictions is really difficult for these basic reasons: Read More

A Major Post, Adaptation, Animal Domestication, Anthropogenic Change, Coevolution, Cultural Evolution, Evolution, Evolution Education, Human Evolution, Lesson Ideas, MSCI-260, Evolution, Prediction, Uncategorized

Predicting Future Evolution (Fall 2016)

Posted 10 Dec 2016 / 0

One of the activities that I regularly have my students complete in my Evolution course is called “Future Evolution“. The activity sends students on what most evolutionary biologists consider a fool’s errand: to try to predict the future evolution of some particular trait in some particular species. Making such predictions is really difficult for these basic reasons: Read More

A Major Post, Adaptation, Animal Domestication, Anthropogenic Change, Coevolution, Cultural Evolution, Evolution, Evolution Education, Human Evolution, Lesson Ideas, MSCI-260, Evolution, Prediction, Resistance Evolution in Parasites

Predicting Future Evolution (Spring 2016)

Posted 10 May 2016 / 0

One of the activities that I regularly have my students complete in my Evolution course is called “Future Evolution“. The activity sends students on what most evolutionary biologists consider a fool’s errand: to try to predict the future evolution of some particular trait in some particular species. Making such predictions is really difficult for these basic reasons: Read More

A Major Post, Adaptation, Animal Domestication, Anthropogenic Change, Coevolution, Cultural Evolution, Evolution, Evolution Education, Human Evolution, Lesson Ideas, MSCI-260, Evolution, Prediction, Resistance Evolution in Parasites

Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes

Posted 20 Sep 2015 / 0

Urban Wildlife Podcast “Episode 4: Cats and Coyotes” What I really enjoyed about this particular episode of the Urban Wildlife Podcast was the interaction between topics covered. The effects of both cats and coyotes are still largely unknown, even as both animals are fairly common in urban areas. Domesticated cats are pretty easy to track Read More

A Minor Post, Animal Domestication, Behavior, Behavioral Ecology, Birds, Canids, Coevolution, Conservation Biology, Data Limitation, Felids, Habitat Fragmentation, Methods, Predation, Radio & Podcasts, Temperate Forest, Tracking, Urban Ecology

{Canis lupus familiaris + Homo sapiens} versus Homo neanderthalenthis?

Posted 17 May 2012 / 0

Daily Mail “Did dogs help humans conquer the world? Man’s best friend may be the reason why we flourished over the Neanderthals” The Atlantic “Humanity’s Best Friend: How Dogs May Have Helped Humans Beat the Neanderthals“

A Minor Post, Animal Domestication, Articles, Canids, Homo species, Human Evolution

Aquaculture on Leonard Lopate

Posted 11 Jul 2011 / 0

Today The Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC featured a segment called “The Future of Fish” with Bryan Walsh  of Time Magazine. Walsh recently published a cover story in Time about the worldwide rise of aquaculture, the practice of raising domesticated fish for human consumption. There was a lot of valuable information covered in the segment, Read More

Animal Domestication, Ecology, Ecosystem Services, Mangrove Forests, Radio & Podcasts

National Geographic’s “Science of Dogs”

Posted 30 Oct 2010 / 0

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 any topic that makes my students more literate in the sciences of ecology and evolution Read More

Animal Domestication, Courses, Cultural Evolution, Ethics, Evolution, Film, Television, & Video, Human Evolution, Mutualism, Reviews, Teaching

The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution

Posted 03 Oct 2010 / 0

I am on the lookout for a new textbook for my non-majors Evolution course, so I was excited to check out Carl Zimmer’s new book “The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution”, published this year by Roberts and Company. For those of you who are not familiar with Carl Zimmer’s work, he is a prolific Read More

Adaptation, Animal Domestication, Books, Coevolution, DNA Barcoding, Evolution, Evolution Education, Evolutionary Modeling, Evolutionary Psychology, Human Evolution, MSCI-260, Evolution, Multilevel Selection, Phylogenetics

The Quest for the Perfect Hive

Posted 07 Jun 2010 / 0

Gene Kritsky is a renowned bee biologist, so when I learned that he had written The Quest for the Perfect Hive: A History of Innovation in Bee Culture, I rushed to get ahold of it. I am very interested in species that form superorganisms (bees, wasps, ants, naked mole-rats, humans), and I have been slowly Read More

Animal Domestication, Books, Coevolution, Cultural Evolution, Reviews, Superorganisms