Evolutionary Ecology Research Research Articles

Die Evolutionäre Kulturökologie: Hintergründe, Prinzipien und Perspektiven einer neuen Theorie der Kultur

Describing nature in ecological terms is well established in natural science, but the same perspective for describing culture in the cultural sciences is rather a new development following the traces of Bateson's “ecology of mind”. The paper outlines the main features of “Evolutionary Cultural Ecology” as it has recently been developed by the “Evolutionary Cultural Ecology Research Group” (E. C. E.). It explains culture as an ecosystemically organized product of overall evolutionary processes. Therefore, the core of the new approach consists of a theory of so-called cultural ecosystems and will be represented by three methodological, three theoretical and three practical principles. Amongst other questions, the treatment of cultural energy, language and the conception of borders is characteristic for it, and it is argued that literature could be fruitfully reconstructed within the framework of cultural ecosystems theory. In the beginning and at the end of the article, some consequences for general anthropology are discussed.

The true cost of host manipulation by parasites

If there is one thing that the past three decades of research in behavioural and evolutionary ecology have taught us, it is that there are no free lunches. Adaptive traits provide net fitness benefits to the animals bearing them, but the gains would be even greater if there were no concurrent costs associated with the expression of those traits. The ability of many parasites to enhance their transmission success by manipulating t 2 r a n m m T c e p I c F

Is the PR job tenure-track too?

T auren is in her second year as a tenure-track professor at a medium-size university. She survived the J_chaos of her first year, got a grant, and attracted a couple of graduate students. Her duties include both research and teaching (graduate and undergraduate) in evolutionary ecology. Her grad student, Jim, showed her a letter to the editor from the local paper a long creationist diatribe, rife with factual and logical errors. Jim and the other students passed it around, chuckling at the obvious fallacies. Lauren found the letter more unsettling than funny, but assumed someone from the local scientific community would reply. Days passed with no response, so she decided 1 to do it herself. She typed a letter to the editor, being especially careful with its tone. She didn't wish to sound dismissive or high-handed, but she wanted to make it crystal clear that the creationist's views were scientifically unfounded. When the paper ran Lauren's letter, Jim and other students congratulated her for taking a stand, and other faculty members echoed the sentiments. Lauren felt good she had done . her part to educate the public. The glow was ephemeral, however. The creationist subi; mitted a vitriolic rebuttal in which, Lauren felt sadly, he had either misunderstood or disregarded her arguments. In the following days, letters from two other local creationists appeared. Jim urged Lauren to write another letter: If scientists don't take a stand here, no one will! Reluctantly, Lauren wrote a second letter to the editor, trying to make the differences between science and anti-science even clearer than before. Given the response to her first letter, she put a considerable amount of time and worry into the second one. Letters from creationists began to appear almost daily in the paper. None of Lauren's peers commented on her second letter. She began to feel overwhelmed and didn't have the time or energy to respond to the flood of letters. She suggested that Jim take up the pen, but he begged off, arguing that he was too busy. Some of the later creationist letters called for action at the next local school board meeting, when science education guidelines were to be reviewed. Other stories in the local paper reported that the school board was deeply divided over the controversy, and that public comment and attendance at the next meeting could be critical. Lauren read these letters and stories with mounting frustration and anxiety. Speaking in front of the school board would require careful preparation. Furthermore, when Lauren checked the date on her calendar, she saw that the timing was a problem. She had managed to get several undergraduates from her evolution course interested in research, and they were due to spend most of that week with her at a remote field site, collecting data for their project. The plant population they planned to study would only bloom for a short time, so delaying their field trip might seriously damage the project. Lauren decided to discuss the situation with two tenured members of the department whom she trusted. Milton, the department chair, had direct and unhesitating advice: Lauren, dig through your files and reread your contract. Your duties here are research, teaching, college service, and community service, in vastly descending order of importance. The more time you spend debating creationists, the less time you will have for research. Forget about influencing the school board. Let the voters sort ^^^^^^^^^E t~ ^that out at the next election. Focus on the things that you're being paid by this university to do: research and teach. Stanley had been in the department for 15 years, and Lauren knew him as a careful and dedicated scientist. They met once a week for coffee. His advice was different: As professional members of an academic discipline, we have a duty to interpret knowledge from our field to the public. The public pays taxes that support this university, and they have a right to expect more from us than journal articles that no one outside the field would ever think of reading. You teach our ^^^~^ tIsK ~classes in evolution, you are up to speed on the issues involved in the debate, and you're a great public speaker, articulate and persuasive. No one else in the department would have as strong an impact on the board as you would. You have a duty to science see this thing through.

SELECTION IN A MODEL SYSTEM: ECOLOGICAL GENETICS OF FLOWERING TIME IN ARABIDOPSIS THALIANA

Arabidopsis thaliana and some of its close allies have been a model system for genetics, developmental biology, and molecular biology for some time. More recently, they have been adopted by an increasing number of laboratories involved in evolutionary ecological research. In this paper, I illustrate some of the methods and advantages concerning the use of Arabidopsis to study selection and the constraints imposed on it by the genetic architecture underlying morphological and life history traits. Populations of A. thaliana and closely related species show a wider ecological variance than had been suspected, and it is increasingly clear that even such a relatively simple organism presents endless challenges to ecologists and evolutionary biologists. The study of the evolution of life history traits in this group also provides us with an invaluable opportunity to advance our search for ways to integrate biological knowledge at the organismal and molecular levels. At the same time, these efforts also yield a better understanding of the type of research that can be carried out independently at these two levels of the biological hierarchy.

Ecological, Behavioral, and Life‐History Correlates of Mammal Extinctions in West Africa

Abstract: Identifying the biological traits of species that predispose them to extinction is a focus of research in evolutionary ecology and conservation biology. This research has traditionally been divided between studies of extinction or decline in undisturbed habitat islands and studies of the persistence of species affected adversely by human influence. I combined these approaches to test for correlations between nine ecological, behavioral, and life‐history traits and vulnerability to local extinction for 41 species of carnivores, primates, and ungulates in fragmented and exploited habitats in Ghana, West Africa, while accounting statistically for phylogeny. Species distributed in isolated populations were most prone to local extinction, and monogamous species and those wherein males defended small harems were also prone to extinction. Body size, fecundity, abundance, habitat specialization, trophic group, and the degree to which hunters and consumers preferred a species generally were unrelated to species persistence. Although population isolation and mating system were the only traits that explained a significant amount of the observed variation in persistence of all species, analyses of carnivores, primates, and ungulates as groups yielded varied results. Mammals most prone to local extinction in my study reserves were also those listed by the World Conservation Union as being at greatest risk of global extinction. Thus, my results suggest that the relative isolation of populations and the mating system displayed by mammals may be good general predictors of their persistence.

Phenotypic integration: studying the ecology and evolution of complex phenotypes

AbstractPhenotypic integration refers to the study of complex patterns of covariation among functionally related traits in a given organism. It has been investigated throughout the 20th century, but has only recently risen to the forefront of evolutionary ecological research. In this essay, I identify the reasons for this late flourishing of studies on integration, and discuss some of the major areas of current endeavour: the interplay of adaptation and constraints, the genetic and molecular bases of integration, the role of phenotypic plasticity, macroevolutionary studies of integration, and statistical and conceptual issues in the study of the evolution of complex phenotypes. I then conclude with a brief discussion of what I see as the major future directions of research on phenotypic integration and how they relate to our more general quest for the understanding of phenotypic evolution within the neo‐Darwinian framework. I suggest that studying integration provides a particularly stimulating and truly interdisciplinary convergence of researchers from fields as disparate as molecular genetics, developmental biology, evolutionary ecology, palaeontology and even philosophy of science.

The changing face of scientific communication: Developing new models for scholarly publishing in the electronic environment. Sponsored by SIG STI, SIG PUB

AbstractThe development of the Internet as a scholarly communication tool and the subsequent (apparent) decline of the print journal are causing great changes in historical systems of scientific communication. Not all of these changes have been positive. The two‐decades long “serials crisis” in subscriptions costs, paired with the increasing recognition that copyright management is of vital importance to the flow of information, has prompted many in scholarly communication fields to call for a sea change in how scientists formally share information. At the same time, the Internet offers novel means of transforming scholarly communication beyond the idea of the traditional journal. We are experiencing the birth pangs of this transformation now. Scientists and libraries are faced with many questions surrounding legal, social, and political issues in the scholarly sphere. These include copyright, peer review, tenure and promotion practices, cost, access versus ownership, and archiving. Speakers will discuss those issues in light of projects and new journals being published in a variety of venues, particularly evolutionary ecology and computer science research.

On signs, memes and MEMS: Toward evolutionary ecosemiotics

The first issue raised by this paper is whether semiotics can bring any added value to ecology. A brief examination of the epistemological status of semiotics in its current forms suggests that semiotics' phenomenological macroconcepts are incommensurate with the complexity of the sciences comprising ecology and are too reductive to usefully map the microprocesses through which organisms evolve and interact. However, there are at least two grounds on which interfacing semiotics with ecology may prove to be scientifically productive: the very looseness of semiotic discourse can be an important catalyser for multidisciplinary interactions, an important condition for the emergence of truly holistic ecology; the present semiotic conceptual apparatus is not carved in stone. All its notions, frames of reference and types of reasoning can evolve in contact with the problems encountered in evolutionary ecological research. Semiotics, as an open-ended epistemological project, remains a proactive intellectual resource. The second issue raised by this paper is precisely to call attention to the opportunity provided by recent developments for rethinking and furthering semiotic inquiry. An attempt is made to show that counterintuitive theories such as memetics and new frontiers in teclmology such as nanotechnology, could help recast ecosentioticsalong more intellectually exciting lines of inquiry than the mere rewriting of ecological discourse in terms of the traditional semiotic macroconcepts. It goes without saying that memetics and nanotechology are not presented here as definitive solutions but simply as indicative of possible directions toward acomprehensive evolutionary ecosentiotics that would radically transform the basis of the 20th century sentiotic discourse and its ideological agenda.

SPARC: The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition

Evolutionary Ecology Research (EER) and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) have set out to show authors that they have options when it comes to publishing their research -- that by publishing in independent or society-sponsored journals they directly support their own profession. Overall, SPARC aims to create competition for the high priced journals, so that libraries have options when subscription renewals come due. "SPARC and its partners are out to change the landscape of academic publishing," said Rick Johnson, SPARC Enterprise Director. "Scholarly communications will not flourish unless there is an alternative to paying thousands of dollars for a single scientific journal."

Inuit foraging groups: some simple models incorporating conflicts of interest, relatedness, and central-place sharing

Theory and research in evolutionary ecology and sociobiology have developed rather independently of each other. The mutual relevance of these two fields for understanding the adaptive significance of social interactions is exemplified by a consideration of cooperative foraging. Several simple models of optimal foraging group size are developed to explore the effect of the following factors: (1) conflicts of interest between group members and prospective joiners; (2) genealogical relatedness and kin-directed altruism; and (3) the scope of the sharing rule governing division of the harvest. Where the alternative is low-return solitary foraging, “joiners” are shown to prefer group sizes that are often suboptimal (in per capita efficiency) for “members.” Predicted group sizes are also above per-capita optima where kin-directed altruism is important and/or where groups and individuals pool their catch at a central place. The effect of kin-directed altruism is incorporated by defining “inclusive efficiency” measures based on genealogical relatedness and group membership options. Expansion of the harvest-sharing network to include all foragers based at a central place is shown to eliminate conflicts of interest between members and joiners, as well as cancel the role of relatedness in shaping optimal group size or composition. Predictions from the models are tested quantitatively with data on Inuit (Canadian Eskimo) foraging groups. Some models offer an improvement in accounting for variation in Inuit foraging group size, but others do not; empirical and theoretical gaps in our understanding are revealed that call for further research.

Opportunity-Cost Foraging Models for Stationary and Mobile Predators

A simple graphical technique is presented. It relates two existing foraging models to marginal valuations of the time and energy currencies used as proxies for fitness. For anthropologists it is also capable of relating these proxy currencies to utility or preference. The predictions of the models are responsive to important theoretical assumptions of evolutionary ecology research: costs in behavioral trade-offs are opportunity costs, often evaluated at the margin. The approach offers a flexible and potentially subtle method of analyzing foraging behavior of both stationary and mobile foragers. It leads to extension of some existing hypotheses about stationary predators, and it refines existing hypotheses about mobile, searching predators.