A wonderful passage from Simon Levin (1975) : Most models which find their way into the pages of journals such as this one are not meant as literal descriptions of particular situations, and thus generate predictions which are not to be tested against precise...
I stumbled across the Wikipedia entry on " microcosm (experimental ecosystem) ". It's, um, sketchy. But it does cite Rees Kassen and my former labmate Lin Jiang , so it's got that going for it.
A little while back, neuroethologist Zen Faulkes said in a post on crowdfunding that he " want[s] to be the Amanda Palmer of science crowdfunding ", Amanda Palmer being a musician who just had massive success crowdfunding her new album. And he's also on record as...
What are your favorite popular science books about ecology? I'm actually struggling to think of favorites. I tend not to read popular science related to ecology. I tend to read popular science books on topics I know less about because I like learning new things; I...
I'm very late on this, but it might be new to some readers, so here goes. Back in 2010 prominent evolutionary theorist Martin Nowak and two of his Harvard colleagues (one of whom is the even more prominent E. O. Wilson) published a lengthy and quite strident Nature...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
What's your favorite ecology textbook? Why? I don't have much to contribute here, because I only teach upper-level courses that don't use textbooks. The last ecology textbook with which I have much personal experience is the 2nd edition of Begon, Harper, and Townsend (...
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