Tree thinking cannot taken for granted: challenges for teaching phylogenetics

Tree thinking is an integral part of modern evolutionary biology, and a necessary precondition for phylogenetics and comparative analyses. Tree thinking has during the 20th century largely replaced group thinking, developmental thinking and anthropocentricism in biology. Unfortunately, however, this does not imply that tree thinking can be taken for granted. The findings reported here indicate that tree thinking is very much an acquired ability which needs extensive training. I tested a sample of undergraduate and graduate students of biology by means of questionnaires. Not a single student was able to correctly interpret a simple tree drawing. Several other findings demonstrate that tree thinking is virtually absent in students unless they are explicitly taught how to read evolutionary trees. Possible causes and implications of this mental bias are discussed. It seems that biological textbooks can be an important source of confusion for students. While group and developmental thinking have disappeared from most textual representations of evolution, they have survived in the evolutionary tree drawings of many textbooks. It is quite common for students to encounter anthropocentric trees and even trees containing stem groups and paraphyla. While these biases originate from the unconscious philosophical assumptions made by authors, the findings suggest that presenting unbiased evolutionary trees in biological publications is not merely a philosophical virtue but has also clear practical implications

The Science of Phylogenetic Systematics: Explanation, Prediction, and Test

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73926/1/j.1096-0031.1999.tb00279.x.pd

Integrating evolution into ecological modelling: accommodating phenotypic changes in agent based models.

PMCID: PMC3733718This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Evolutionary change is a characteristic of living organisms and forms one of the ways in which species adapt to changed conditions. However, most ecological models do not incorporate this ubiquitous phenomenon. We have developed a model that takes a 'phenotypic gambit' approach and focuses on changes in the frequency of phenotypes (which differ in timing of breeding and fecundity) within a population, using, as an example, seasonal breeding. Fitness per phenotype calculated as the individual's contribution to population growth on an annual basis coincide with the population dynamics per phenotype. Simplified model variants were explored to examine whether the complexity included in the model is justified. Outputs from the spatially implicit model underestimated the number of individuals across all phenotypes. When no phenotype transitions are included (i.e. offspring always inherit their parent's phenotype) numbers of all individuals are always underestimated. We conclude that by using a phenotypic gambit approach evolutionary dynamics can be incorporated into individual based models, and that all that is required is an understanding of the probability of offspring inheriting the parental phenotype

From vigilance to violence : Tactics of mate retention in American undergraduates

Although the attraction and selection of mates are central to human reproduction, the retention of acquired mates is often necessary to actualize the promise of reproductive effort. Three empirical studies used act frequency methods to identify, assess the reported performance frequencies of, and evaluate the perceived effectiveness of 19 tactics and 104 acts of human mate guarding and retention. In Study 1 (N = 105), a hierarchical taxonomy of tactics was developed from a pool of nominated acts. We then assessed the reported performance frequencies of 19 retention tactics and 104 acts and tested three hypotheses derived from evolutionary models in an undergraduate sample (N = 102). Study 2 (N = 46) provided an independent test of these hypotheses by assessing the perceived effectiveness of each tactic. Discussion draws implications for sexual poaching, susceptibility to pair-bond defection, and the power of act frequency methods for preserving the proximate specificity and systemic complexity inherent in human mating processes.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/27156/1/0000151.pd

How Biology Became Social and What It Means for Social Theory

In this paper I first offer a systematic outline of a series of conceptual novelties in the life-sciences that have favoured, over the last three decades, the emergence of a more social view of biology. I focus in particular on three areas of investigation: (1) technical changes in evolutionary literature that have provoked a rethinking of the possibility of altruism, morality and prosocial behaviours in evolution; (2) changes in neuroscience, from an understanding of the brain as an isolated data processor to the ultrasocial and multiply connected social brain of contemporary neuroscience; and (3) changes in molecular biology, from the view of the gene as an autonomous master of development to the ‘reactive genome’ of the new emerging field of molecular epigenetics. In the second section I reflect on the possible implications for the social sciences of this novel biosocial terrain and argue that the postgenomic language of extended epigenetic inheritance and blurring of the nature/nurture boundaries will be as provocative for neo-Darwinism as it is for the social sciences as we have known them. Signs of a new biosocial language are emerging in several social-science disciplines and this may represent an exciting theoretical novelty for twenty-first social theory

Mental and perceptual feedback in the development of creative flow

Sketching is considered by artists and designers to be a vital tool in the creative process. However, research shows that externalisation during the creative process (i.e., sketching) is not necessary to create effectively. This study examines whether sketching may play a more important role in the subjective experience of creativity by facilitating the deeply focused, optimal state of consciousness termed ‘flow’ (being ‘in the zone’). The study additionally explored whether sketching affects flow by easing cognitive load or by providing a clearer sense of self-feedback. Participants carried out the creative mental synthesis task (combining sets of simple shapes into creative drawings), experimentally simulating the visual creative process. Ideas were generated either mentally before committing to a final drawing, or with external perceptual support through sketching, and cognitive load was varied by using either three- or five-shape sets. The sketching condition resulted in greater experience of flow and lower perceived task difficulty. However, cognitive load did not affect flow and there was no interaction between load and sketching conditions. These findings are the first to empirically demonstrate that sketching increases flow experience, and that this is not dependent on an associated reduction in overall working memory load