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Carnival of Evolution #47

drupaladmin
1 May 2012
This month's compilation of the best in evolutionary blogging is now up at Evolving Thoughts . Lots of good stuff as usual. One post that caught my eye talks about how Steven J. Gould was wrong to claim that Cope's Rule applies only to living organisms, not inanimate...

Advice for grad students: overcoming the feeling that you're an imposter (UPDATED)

drupaladmin
30 April 2012
Grad school can be daunting, especially for new grad students. It's a totally different experience than undergrad, and it's easy to feel like you don't belong, like you have no idea what you're doing, that you somehow fooled everyone to even get this far. In short, it'...

Is ecology becoming too collaborative?

drupaladmin
27 April 2012
Is it just me, or is everyone overcommitting to too many collaborative projects lately? Everybody likes to collaborate these days. It's easier to do these days, and the culture of ecology values it highly. And frankly, everyone sees it as a way to get their names on a...

Human instructors > computers

drupaladmin
23 April 2012
Like me, many of you are probably grading final exams right now. For a very funny illustration of why, for better or worse, computers will not be able to do this task for you any time soon, see here (see also here for an example of the sort of essay that computer...

Favorite ecology and evolution quotes? (UPDATED)

drupaladmin
22 April 2012
What are your favorite quotes about ecology and evolution? There's the final paragraph of Darwin's Origin , of course--the "tangled bank" image, "There is grandeur in this view of life", and all that. As good as anything I've ever read, but perhaps a bit too lengthy to...

Is 'synthesis ecology' a distinct scientific discipline?

drupaladmin
20 April 2012
Over at I'm a Chordata! Urochordata!, Jarrett Byrnes asks whether 'synthesis ecology' is a distinct scientific discipline . Interesting question, on which even current and former NCEAS postdocs can't agree on an answer (not surprisingly, since if it is a discipline it'...

A key problem in interpreting observational data (UPDATEDx2)

drupaladmin
18 April 2012
I'm a bit late on this, but I just found this very nice blog post from Bob O'Hara on a little-recognized (at least in ecology) problem in interpreting observational data: "errors in variables". That is, for whatever reason, there's random error in the values of your...

Scroll down for cool new guest post!

drupaladmin
18 April 2012
A new guest post by Ayco Tack and colleagues , discussing the background and implications of their interesting new Oikos paper , is now up. But due to a quirk in the way WordPress schedules posts, the post appears further down the page, inserted between two older posts...

What's the worst you've ever been mis-cited?

drupaladmin
18 April 2012
As an academic, sooner or later you'll be mis-cited. Sometimes badly. More than once as a reviewer I've had to correct authors who were trying to cite my papers (and those of others) in support of a claim that was actually the opposite of what those papers demonstrated...

Yes, IDH zombies are still worth worrying about (UPDATED)

drupaladmin
16 April 2012
Via Twitter, Nate Hough-Snee asks whether zombie ideas about the IDH are actually taught any more, and suggests that the idea that the IDH is still popular is itself a zombie idea. That's a question I've asked myself about another zombie. But I was wrong . And in this...

Why shoot yourself in the foot?

drupaladmin
16 April 2012
******************************* A while back I polled readers to ask what new features they'd like to see on the Oikos blog. One popular choice was guest posts by authors of recent and forthcoming Oikos papers. Ask and ye shall receive: here's the first one! It's by...

Hardest (or weirdest) question you were asked during your candidacy exam?

drupaladmin
16 April 2012
One of my Ph.D. students will be taking his candidacy exam soon. This is the exam, also known as "qualifiers" or "orals" at some universities, that tests whether you have the background knowledge to get a Ph.D. In order for candidacy exams to fulfill their purpose,...

From the archives: defending microcosm experiments

drupaladmin
16 April 2012
A microcosm paper on which I am a co-author just got rejected. Which seems as good an excuse as any to repost this , in which I shoot down all the commonly-voiced blanket objections to microcosms in ecology. I have yet to hear a convincing unconditional objection to...

Charles Darwin is going to be in an animated pirate movie

drupaladmin
13 April 2012
The movie version of The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! comes out later this month. I can't wait!

Everything you ever wanted to know about the Price equation

drupaladmin
12 April 2012
...is covered in this review by the great Steven Frank . I know some readers think of me as 'that Price equation guy'. But what I know (and continue to learn) about the Price equation, I mostly got from reading (and continuing to ponder) Steven Frank's stuff. This one...

The paradigm of 'paradigm shifts' turns 50

drupaladmin
12 April 2012
Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is 50 years old this year. It's one of the most famous books on philosophy of science ever published, and one of the only ones to become well-known (albeit usually in a second-hand way) among scientists themselves...

Zombie ideas about disturbance: a dialogue (UPDATED)

drupaladmin
10 April 2012
UPDATE: Just to be clear, disturbance, and environmental variability more generally, can promote stable coexistence. They just can't do so via the mechanisms that the Professor is trying to teach in this dialogue. I've been clear about this in previous posts , but it...

Advice: why network at conferences?

drupaladmin
9 April 2012
Following up on my post on how to network at scientific conferences, it occurred to me that I left unstated why one might want to "network" at scientific conferences. I guess I thought it was obvious, but perusing the comments over at the original post by Scicurious...

Succeeding in academia: being good vs. being lucky

drupaladmin
9 April 2012
I've written about how I was very lucky to get a tenure-track academic position. To complement that anecdote, here's some discussion from NeuroDojo of an actual data-based study of how luck vs. talent determined the career outcomes for 300 physicists tracked over 20...

From the archives: weak reasons for choosing a research project

drupaladmin
9 April 2012
It's the time of year when many first year graduate students are preparing their research proposals. So now seems like a good time to repost my advice on how not to choose your research project. One point I'd add to that post is that it's always a bad idea to try to...

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