Behavioural ecology has long focused on “the evolutionary basis for animal behaviour due to ecological pressures”. With decades of work now showing that foraging, aggression, mating, and cooperation are elegantly adapted, why should we keep studying behaviour?
I think there are several reasons.
Here’s what bugs me about James Damore’s recent anti-Google screed: it’s a terrible misuse of biology.
The question he addresses is: Why are there so few women in tech and tech leadership? In his memo to Google, Damore offered an explanation (note: I added the numbers):
On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because:
(1) They’re universal across human cultures
(2) They often have clear biological causes and links to prenatal testosterone
(3) Biological males that were castrated at birth and raised as females often still identify and act like males
(4) The underlying traits are highly heritable
(5) They’re exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective
I’ll assume, for the sake of argument, that points (1)-(4) are more or less true.
I just reviewed my first manuscript where the authors provided a reproducible analysis (i.e., they shared their data and analysis script with the reviewers). This is something my coauthors and I have tried to provide with our recent studies, but it was my first time experiencing it as a referee.
I think it really helped, but it also raised new questions about traditional peer review.
I just got back from the Hummingbird Festival in Sedona, Arizona. It was an honour to be invited there to present our work on flight.
Photo by Maria Mahar at www.hummingbirdpictures.net
The audience at the festival had a ton of great questions and I learned a lot. For example, the Anna’s hummingbirds are a fairly recent arrival in Sedona, just as they are in Vancouver, because urbanization has also allowed the species to gradually expand its range east into the desert (as well as north). I wonder how that has affected the hummingbird community there? I also learned that it is pretty easy to set up an outdoor Drosophila colony as a protein source for breeding hummingbirds.
We saw the Grand Canyon and more bats, hummingbirds, and aura photographers than ever before in one place. Arizona has great insects, too. My favourite? The “pleasing fungus beetle” we spotted at Starbucks.
Photo by Charlie Croskery.