Life history trade-offs are the bread and butter of biological anthropology. The way we understand the importance of certain traits and life events is in how they vary in response to selection pressures like energy availability or climate, but also cultural beliefs and practices. That’s why it matters to us when you got your first [...]

I’ve been reading some good stuff the last few weeks, thought I’d share it here. Pedagogy Cheating to Learn. A great way to engage students is put them in charge of the conditions for their exam. These students “cheated” by working together on an animal behavior final. Math teacher explains math anxiety. Math and science anxiety [...]

A few weeks ago I was reading over page proofs for a now-published manuscript, and I must have had my science writer brain on. I started to read what I had written and, for one excruciating moment, was horrified at what I saw. The writing seemed so stiff, so lifeless! Who the heck was I [...]

It was getting late, the student center all but deserted. My old friend and I had a table to ourselves, awkwardly wedged among the chairs that had been set in a circle for an invited talk I had just given to some undergraduates about issues for women in science. My friend alluded to having a [...]

Earlier this semester I talked about a few new kinds of assignments I was trying out in my evolutionary medicine class. I’ve got my students posting on the readings every week at the group blog, and there have been several great interactions. For instance, here is a thoughtful comment on one student’s post: “…I have [...]

So, I haven’t had a chance to blog these last few weeks. Part of it is that I’ve been submitting papers, revising papers, teaching, and giving talks – the usual gig for a professor. Part of it, if I’m being honest, is the new workout program I’ve been on, and the extra three hours a [...]

My team does a lot together. We work out. We practice and scrimmage. We swap recipes and cook food together. We watch footage and we hold meetings. We try to listen and then talk all over each other. We squabble. We love. Roller derby is the most brutal, yet most fun, sport I have ever [...]

The #scio13ID session is here! It was a great session thanks to a brilliant, brave, thoughtful audience. Watch live streaming video from scienceonline at livestream.com

Field experiences are often what help an undergraduate decide whether or not to pursue biological anthropology, they determine the course of a graduate student’s dissertation, and they provide the data needed to launch grants and make tenure cases for faculty. Yet, because field experiences often occur in remote places, far from our universities, entirely different [...]

(Alternate, Twitter-sourced titles: “5 Ways to Prove Darwin Wasn’t Crazy,” “Shut the Eff Up and Science Already,” “5 Ways Psychology Needs to Evolve.”) Evolutionary psychology, the study of human psychological adaptations, does not have a popular or scientific reputation for being rigorous, even though there are rigorous, thoughtful scientists in the field. The field is [...]