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Free teaching tools
Recent Major Posts
- 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
- Can playing games make the world a better place?
- My review of “How Species Interact” published in Ecological Modelling
Recent Minor Posts
- 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
- Up-Goer Five text editor challenges you to make accessible explanations
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What I am reading now
Category Archives: Multilevel Selection
Freeman Dyson wins the contest, and then says the contest is stupid
Institute for Advanced Study “The Prisoner’s Dilemma” One of my favorite skateboarders when I was young was Natas Kaupas, an innovative skater who pioneered a lot of modern streetstyle. Natas was one of those skaters who could do things that … Continue reading
Enforcing norms may be for personal gain, not to maintain social order (at least amongst Santa Barbara undergraduates)
PLoS ONE “What Are Punishment and Reputation for?” Once again, a valuable and ingenious experiment over-reaches on the meaning of its finding, and the over-reach bleeds into the popular media. This is a really valuable experiment in that it asks … Continue reading
ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
What was the ‘big news’ at this year’s Ecological Society of America meeting? Given that this meeting is composed of so many different meetings running concurrently, this just might be an impossible question to answer fairly. But for me, this … Continue reading
Posted in A Major Post, Altruism, Biodiversity Loss, Conservation Biology, Cooperation, Ecological Modeling, Ecological Society of America, Ecology Education, Ecosystem Services, Environmental Justice, Group Selection, Marine Ecosystems, Multilevel Selection, Public Policy, Punishment, Resource Consumption, Social Capital, Sustainability, System Stability, Talks & Seminars, Teaching, Teaching Tools, The Evolution of Sustainable Use
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Steven Pinker makes it clear that he is not a “group selectionist”
Frequently I feel like I am listening to an early 2000′s George W. Bush speech when the ‘opponents of group selection’ step up to the podium. Seemingly, you are either “with us or against us” when it comes to considering … Continue reading
Are the population dynamics of Dupont’s lark dictated by multilevel selective pressures?
An fascinating new paper published this week in the journal PLoS One demonstrates how selection acting at least three different levels produces distinct selective pressures that shape the song behavior of male Dupont’s lark (Chersophilus duponti) in the Ebro Valley … Continue reading
Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
Martin Nowak has accomplished a lot for a mid-career scientist. His theoretical work exploring how cooperation evolves has illuminated the importance of a great number of evolutionary mechanisms. He has also been unafraid to tackle real-life problems of cooperation, including … Continue reading
Posted in Altruism, Books, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Ethics, Evolutionary Modeling, Game Theory, Group Selection, History, Human Evolution, Human Nature, Kin Selection, Language Evolution, Multilevel Selection, Mutualism, Punishment, Reciprocity, Religion, Superorganisms, Sustainability
Tagged David Sloan Wilson, Edward O. Wilson, Garrett Hardin, JBS Haldane, John Maynard Smith, Martin A. Nowak, Roger Highfield, Supercooperators, William D. Hamilton
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Science in Art & Design: Justin Taylor’s “The Gospel of Anarchy”
There are so many science books that I want to read that I frequently neglect to read fiction. This is too bad, because good fiction can be as rich with interesting hypotheses about human nature and evolution as any book … Continue reading
Naturalistic Fallacy: 1, Sam Harris: 0
For those who don’t know Sam Harris, he is a rather famous critic of theism who often invokes science and broad rationalism in his arguments for the abandonment of organized religion. Along with Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins … Continue reading
Posted in Cultural Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology, Human Evolution, Human Nature, Memetic Fitness, Multilevel Selection, Philosophy, Radio & Podcasts, Religion, Talks & Seminars, Web
Tagged Christopher Hitchens, David Sloan Wilson, Frans de Waal, George C. Williams, Jessica Pierce, Marc Bekoff, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, TED Talks
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Martin Nowak lecture on The Evolution of Cooperation at MIT
I just checked out a lecture given by Martin Nowak at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that was recently posted on the MIT videos site. The video was recently posted on the MIT site, but it is not entirely clear … Continue reading
Posted in Altruism, Behavior, Behavioral Ecology, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Evolutionary Modeling, Game Theory, Group Selection, Human Evolution, Kin Selection, Mathematics, Multilevel Selection, Psychological Adaptation, Radio & Podcasts, Reciprocity, Talks & Seminars, Web
Tagged Corina Tarnita, Martin A. Nowak, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Supercooperators
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Understanding Rupert Murdoch from an Evolutionary Perspective
If you have been following the news at all this summer, you are undoubtedly aware of the recent phone hacking scandal at The News of the World, a tabloid newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch’s [1, 2, 3] global media empire, … Continue reading
“The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
I just finished reading Robert Axelrod’s seminal book entitled The Evolution of Cooperation. Although I had read a lot about Axelrod’s work and am quite familiar with the body of literature that it inspired, I had never actually read his … Continue reading
Posted in Altruism, Behavioral Ecology, Books, Coevolution, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Evolution, Evolutionary Modeling, Game Theory, Human Evolution, Individual-based Models, Interdisciplinarity, Multilevel Selection, Mutualism, Political Science, Public Policy, Reciprocity, Sociology, Spatially Explicit Modeling
Tagged Prisoner's Dilemma, Richard Dawkins, Robert Axelrod
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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
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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
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Darwin’s Cathedral versus The God Delusion
Awhile back I read Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and more recently I finished David Sloan Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedral. Both books provide a view on religion from the perspective of a prominent evolutionary biologist, and the contrast between these … Continue reading
Posted in Evolution, Group Selection, Human Evolution, Multilevel Selection, Religion, Reviews
Tagged David Sloan Wilson, Richard Dawkins
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