Category Archives: Anthropocene Biosphere

“Beyond DNA: integrating inclusive inheritance into an extended theory of evolution”

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CITATION:
E. Danchin et al. 2011. Nature Reviews Genetics, vol. 12, pp. 475-486.
ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:
ABSTRACT:
Many biologists are calling for an ‘extended evolutionary synthesis’ that would ‘modernize the modern synthesis’ of evolution. Biological information is typically considered as being transmitted across generations by the DNA sequence alone, but accumulating evidence indicates that Continue reading →

“The Global Carbon Cycle: A Test of Our Knowledge of Earth as a System”

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CITATION:
P. Falkowski et al. 2000. Science, vol. 290, pp. 291-296.
ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:
ABSTRACT:
Motivated by the rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 due to human activities since the Industrial Revolution, several international scientific research programs have analyzed the role of Continue reading →

Setting conservation priorities and moving species in a complicated Anthropocene

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THIS POST IS PART OF OUR ANTHROPOCENE BIOSPHERE PROJECT–A SERIES OF POSTS ON ERLE ELLIS’ ‘ECOLOGY IN AN ANTHROPOGENIC BIOSPHERE‘ (ECOLOGICAL MONOGRAPHS, 85/3 (2015))

The anthropogenic biosphere calls for a new perspective on preserving nature. In his paper for the centennial of the Ecological Society of America, Erle Ellis argues that in order to sustain humanity, we will need to Continue reading →

“The cognitive niche: Coevolution of intelligence, sociality, and language”

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CITATION:
Steven Pinker. 2010. PNAS, vol. 107, suppl. 2, pp. 8993–8999.
ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:
ABSTRACT:
Although Darwin insisted that human intelligence could be fully explained by the theory of evolution, the codiscoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, claimed that abstract intelligence was of no use to ancestral humans and could only be explained by Continue reading →

The effect of humans on the landscape in Oklahoma: Where is the water? And the effect of spatial data resolution

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THIS POST IS PART OF OUR ANTHROPOCENE BIOSPHERE PROJECT–A SERIES OF POSTS ON ERLE ELLIS’ ‘ECOLOGY IN AN ANTHROPOGENIC BIOSPHERE‘ (ECOLOGICAL MONOGRAPHS, 85/3 (2015))

Ellis (2015) discusses in detail the idea that to be able to understand long-term ecological patterns and processes it is now necessary to understand human sociocultural processes first. To visualize the direct influence of Continue reading →

The Anthropocene Biosphere

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I’m excited to announce a special project on the blog—a semester-long discussion of Erle Ellis’ 2015 paper ‘Ecology in an Anthropogenic Biosphere’ (Ecological Monographs, 85: 287–331. doi:10.1890/14-2274.1 ). In this paper Ellis proposes Continue reading →