The New York Times had a terrific story on Wednesday on the recovery of an endemic trout previously believed to be extinct since the 1940s in Pyramid Lake, Nevada. As I am currently teaching my class, Ecology, Evolution, and Human Health, with its emphasis on adaptation as local process and human-environment interaction, I was happy [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Evolution'
The Return of Lahontan Cutthroat Trout
April 25th, 2013 · No Comments
Tags: Conservation · Evolution
On Anthropological Sciences and the AAA
November 19th, 2012 · No Comments
I guess the time has rolled around again for my annual navel-gaze regarding my discipline, my place within it, and its future. Two strangely interwoven events have conspired to make me particularly philosophical as we enter into the winter holidays. First, I am in the middle of a visit by my friend, colleague, and former [...]
Tags: Anthropology · Evolution · Human Ecology · science · Teaching
Risk Management: The Fundamental Human Adaptation
April 15th, 2011 · 1 Comment
It was a conceptually dense week in class. The first part of the week I spent talking about topics such as ecological complexity, vulnerability, adaptation, and resilience. One of the key take-home messages of this material is that uncertainty is ubiquitous in complex ecological systems. Now, while systemic uncertainty does not mean that the world [...]
Tags: Anthropology · Evolution · Human Ecology
Response to Selection
April 3rd, 2011 · 2 Comments
I’m done now with the first week of the Spring quarter. It was a bit challenging because I had to attend the PAA meetings in Washington, DC for the latter part of the week, but Brian Wood ably covered for me on Thursday. I thought that I would use the blog as a tool for [...]
Tags: Anthropology · Evolution · Teaching
Ecology, Evolution, and Human Health
March 25th, 2011 · No Comments
Yesterday, I spent most of the day collecting content for my upcoming classes this spring and getting the course web sites together. For the first time in a while, I will (officially) be teaching two classes in one quarter (which effectively means teaching three or four when I add the other things like lab meetings [...]
Tags: Anthropology · Evolution · Human Ecology
On Systematic Nomenclature
May 12th, 2010 · 2 Comments
OK, this may seem like a pretty serious geek-out, but a pet peeve of mine has just been tweaked by the New York Times. Olivia Judson has written her usual stimulating and thought-provoking essay, this time on the recent decoding and publication of the Neanderthal genome by Svante Pääbo and colleagues at the Max Planck [...]
Tags: Evolution
Best Simile Ever?
April 20th, 2010 · No Comments
Matt Ridley pens a hilarious simile in his great book, Nature Via Nurture (published as The Agile Gene in the United States) that I think you might actually need to be an evolutionary anthropologist to fully appreciate. And I quote: Just as sex enabled mammals to combine two great inventions — lactation and the placenta [...]
Tags: Anthropology · Evolution
Most Cited Papers in Current Anthropology
February 22nd, 2010 · No Comments
A friend sent me a link the other day to the top 20 most cited articles in the journal, Current Anthropology. Much to my delight, I found that a paper that I co-authored is the #7 all-time citation leader and a paper co-authored by my Stanford colleague Rebecca Bird is the #19. As I walked [...]
Tags: Anthropology · Diet & Nutrition · Evolution
The Key to the Survival of the Human Species?
October 16th, 2009 · No Comments
Perhaps it’s just me being a bit groggy from jet-lag, but I just read one of the most bizarre things I think I have ever seen in the New York Times. There is a generally very interesting article by Sarah Kershaw on so-called “cougars,” older women who have sexual relationships with younger men. It was [...]
Tags: Demography · Evolution
Stanford Workshop in Biodemography
September 3rd, 2009 · 3 Comments
On 29-31 October, we will be holding our next installment of the Stanford Workshops in Formal Demography and Biodemography, the result of an ongoing grant from NICHD to Shripad Tuljapurkar and myself. This time around, we will venture onto the bleeding edge of biodemography. Specific topics that we will cover include: The use of genomic [...]
Tags: Demography · Evolution · Human Ecology · Statistics