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New Biology Catalog!

June 17, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Be among the first the check out our new biology catalog!

Of particular interest is The Princeton Guide to Evolution, a forthcoming comprehensive, concise, and authoritative reference to the major subjects and key concepts in evolutionary biology, from genes to mass extinctions. Edited by a distinguished team of evolutionary biologists, with contributions from leading researchers, the guide contains some 100 clear, accurate, and up-to-date articles on the most important topics in seven major areas: phylogenetics and the history of life; selection and adaptation; evolutionary processes; genes, genomes, and phenotypes; speciation and macroevolution; evolution of behavior, society, and humans; and evolution and modern society.

For further reading, check out John Tyler Bonner’s Randomness in Evolution. In this concise, elegantly written book, he makes the bold and provocative claim that some biological diversity may be explained by something other than natural selection.

Also be sure to note Daphne J. Fairbairn’s Odd Couples: Extraordinary Differences between the Sexes in the Animal Kingdom. While we joke that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, our gender differences can’t compare to those of other animals. Looking at some of the most amazing creatures on the planet, Odd Couples sheds astonishing light on what it means to be male or female in the animal kingdom.

We’ll also see you at the Society for the Study of Evolution’s annual meting June 21-25 in Snowbird, Utah at booth 14. Please join us Saturday, June 22 at 7:30 p.m. for a reception in celebration of the publication of Odd Couples: Extraordinary Differences between the Sexes in the Animal Kingdom and our forthcoming The Princeton Guide to Evolution. Meet the authors and editors, and enjoy wine and cheese!

Filed Under: Biological Sciences, New Catalog, Twitter Tagged With: , ,

Happy Father’s Day from #OddCouples

June 13, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Father’s Day is upon us once more, which can mean only one thing: new eCards, this time for whoever you call “dad,” “old man,” “papa,” “pop,” “pa,” or even your favorite father-figure or head of household. We take our inspiration yet again from Daphne Fairbairn’s wonderful book Odd Couples: Extraordinary Differences between the Sexes in the Animal Kingdom, which recently published on May 15th.

So go ahead and blog about, Tweet out, post to Facebook, and otherwise share these! Enjoy!

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Filed Under: Biological Sciences, Birds and Natural History, Design, Math & Science, Natural Science, Popular Science

Happy Mother’s Day from #OddCouples

May 10, 2013 by

This Mother’s Day, we’re offering up some cheeky eCards for you to share with the special women in your life—all inspired by Daphne Fairbairn’s fascinating book Odd Couples: Extraordinary Differences between the Sexes in the Animal Kingdom, which publishes on May 15th. Trust us, human beings (yes, this includes Mom and Dad) won’t seem so strange once you’ve read about these other species!

Feel free to blog about, Tweet out, post to Facebook, and otherwise share these! Enjoy!

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Filed Under: Biological Sciences, Birds and Natural History, Design, Math & Science, Natural Science, Popular Science

Q&A with author of ‘Odd Couples’

May 9, 2013 by

Daphne Fairbairn, author of Odd Couples: Extraordinary Differences Between the Sexes in the Animal Kingdom, completed a Q&A for National Geographic in which she covers some of the broader themes of the book. Check it out below!

Your spouse may baffle you at times, but does he latch on to your rear as a miniscule parasite 500,000 times smaller than you?

That’s what a male seadevil does. Is your honey 50 times your size and liable to eat you after a snuggle? Let’s hope not, else she’d be a garden spider.

e animal kingdom is full of amatory pairs whose extreme physical differences would give a matchmaker pause. But many of these dimorphic differences make good evolutionary sense, Daphne J. Fairbairn explains in her book Odd Couples: Extraordinary Differences between the Sexes in the Animal Kingdom.

National Geographic Senior Writer Rachel Hartigan Shea spoke with Fairbairn, a biologist at the University of California, Riverside, about why in nature, love isn’t always one size fits all.

…

Why are the differences between the sexes in some animals so extreme?

If you are coming into the world as a male, the way you get your genes into the next generation is getting your sperm to meet up with the eggs of females. So whatever it takes to do that is how the males are going to turn out. (Related Q&A: “Unlikely Animal Friendships.”)

Read the full article at National Geographic

Filed Under: Author Q&A, Biological Sciences, Twitter, Women and Gender Studies

Social Learning: People See, People Do/ Monkey See, Monkey Do

May 1, 2013 by

It has been studied and proven that human beings learn socially. We observe that it is right and polite to hold the door open for others instead of slamming it in their faces and we learn that you don’t cause a loud ruckus in a crowded library (especially during finals week) or you will be hated by everyone in there.  These are not lessons we are told explicitly; rather these are lessons we learn through observing the behavior of other humans. Similarly, animals learn socially just as we do.

In a study reported on by The New York Times, researchers discovered that monkeys learned socially. The monkeys had been previously classically conditioned to only eat pink or blue-dyed corn and to shun the other colored corn. When the monkeys were moved to a different location in which the other colored corn was the corn that the local monkeys were conditioned to eat, the pink and blue-dyed corn eating monkeys switched to eating the colored corn that the local monkeys were eating.

Humpback whales have also demonstrated that they socially learn, as reported in this article on National Geographic. A renegade humpback whale in the Gulf of Maine made a new method in catching fish that was much different than the normal routine. Soon enough, 40% of humpback whales have adopted the practice to catch their dinner.

These phenomena can be understood through Social Learning: An Introduction to Mechanisms, Methods, and Models, a new book on social learning that is available this summer.

Many animals, including humans, acquire valuable skills and knowledge by copying others. Scientists refer to this as social learning. It is one of the most exciting and rapidly developing areas of behavioral research and sits at the interface of many academic disciplines, including biology, experimental psychology, economics, and cognitive neuroscience. Social Learning provides a comprehensive, practical guide to the research methods of this important emerging field. William Hoppitt and Kevin Laland define the mechanisms thought to underlie social learning and demonstrate how to distinguish them experimentally in the laboratory. They present techniques for detecting and quantifying social learning in nature, including statistical modeling of the spatial distribution of behavior traits. They also describe the latest theory and empirical findings on social learning strategies, and introduce readers to mathematical methods and models used in the study of cultural evolution. This book is an indispensable tool for researchers and an essential primer for students.

  • Provides a comprehensive, practical guide to social learning research
  • Combines theoretical and empirical approaches
  • Describes techniques for the laboratory and the field
  • Covers social learning mechanisms and strategies, statistical modeling techniques for field data, mathematical modeling of cultural evolution, and more

William Hoppitt is senior lecturer in zoology at Anglia Ruskin University. Kevin N. Laland is professor of behavioral and evolutionary biology at the University of St. Andrews. His books include Culture Evolves and Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution

Filed Under: Biological Sciences, Psychology, Twitter

Dinosaur Embryo Discovered

April 11, 2013 by

Stated simply, dinosaurs are cool. Jurassic Park may have given me nightmares once I was old enough to see it, but they are frighteningly majestic.

Paleontologists discovered fossilized dinosaur embryos in China recently making them the oldest preserved organic remains of a  budding dinosaur to date. The embryos are thought to be sauropodomorphs “because they are similar in many ways to intact embryonic skeletons of Massospondylus, a sauropodomorph that Reisz [paleontologist]  unearthed in South Africa in 2005″  according to Nature.com. The new discoveries will help scientists understand better how these dinosaurs grew to their full adult size.

4-11 dinos

Left: Sauropodomorph in egg. Image via the Huffington Post
Right: Adult sauropodomorph. Image via BBC

Unfortunately, it is confirmed that there is no probability that these embryos could result in dinosaur reincarnation.

To learn more about sauropodomorphs, The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs by Gregory S. Paul has an entire chapter devoted to them.

The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs is a must-have for anyone who loves dinosaurs, from the amateur enthusiast to the professional paleontologist.

  • The first authoritative field guide to dinosaurs
  • Covers more than 735 species
  • Beautiful, large-format volume
  • Lavishly illustrated throughout, with more than 600 color and black-and-white drawings and figures, including:
  • More than 130 color life studies, including scenic views
  • Close to 450 skeletal, skull, head, and muscle drawings
  • 8 color paleo-distribution maps
  • Color timeline
  • Describes anatomy, physiology, locomotion, reproduction, and growth of dinosaurs, as well as the origin of birds and the extinction of nonavian dinosaurs

And, while mosquitoes in fossilized amber can’t bring back dinosaurs, The Amber Forest: A Reconstruction of a Vanished World by George Poinar Jr., & Roberta Poinar brings to life the environment in which the dinosaurs lived.

In Jurassic Park, amber fossils provided the key to bringing dinosaurs back to life. Scientists in the movie extracted dinosaur blood from mosquitoes preserved for millions of years in amber–hardened tree resin–and used the blood’s DNA to revive the creatures that terrified audiences around the globe. In this book, George and Roberta Poinar use amber for a similar act of revival–only they bring back an entire ecosystem. The Poinars are world leaders in the study of amber fossils and have spent years examining the uniquely rich supply that has survived from the ancient forests of the Dominican Republic. They draw on their research here to reconstruct in words, drawings, and spectacular color photographs the ecosystem that existed on the island of Hispaniola between fifteen and forty-five million years ago. The result is the most accurate picture scientists have yet produced of any tropical forest of the past.

The specimens examined by the Poinars reflect amber’s extraordinary qualities as a medium for preservation. Millions of years ago, countless plants, invertebrates, and small vertebrates were trapped in the sticky resin that flowed from the trees of ancient forests and, as that resin hardened into translucent, golden amber, they were preserved in almost perfect condition. Samples analyzed and illustrated here include a wide range of insects and plants–many now extinct–as well as such vertebrates as frogs, lizards, birds, and small mammals. There are even frozen scenes of combat: an assassin bug grappling with a stingless bee, for example, and a spider attacking a termite. By examining these plants and animals and comparing them to related forms that exist today, the authors shed new light on the behavior of these organisms as well as the environment and climate in which they lived and died.

The Poinars present richly detailed drawings of how the forests once appeared. They discuss how and when life colonized Hispaniola and what caused some forms to become extinct. Along the way, they describe how amber is formed, how and where it has been preserved, and how it is mined, sold, and occasionally forged for profit today. The book is a beautifully written and produced homage to a remarkable, vanished world.

Filed Under: Biological Sciences, Earth Sciences, In the News, Twitter

“Should Congress be more like honeybees?” asks NPR’s Robert Krulwich

February 21, 2013 by

If bees ran the world, the filibuster simply wouldn’t exist, according to this report by Robert Krulwich at NPR (accompanied by charming illustrations, too!).

Bees are democrats. They vote. When a community of bees has to make a choice, like where to build a new hive, they meet, debate and decide. But here’s what they don’t do: they don’t filibuster. No single bee (or small band of bees) will stand against the majority, insisting and insisting for hours. They can’t.

Bee biology prevents it.

See, scout bees will find a location they think works for the new hive. They campaign for their location by dancing — communicating the coordinates of the site and inviting the rest of the hive to check it out.

If she feels really strongly, she will dance with extra energy, for a longer time.

Even if most of the other bees have chosen a different tree, they won’t stop her dance, or tell her to be quiet. Or have three-fifths of them invoke “cloture,” a fancy way of saying “shut up.” They will wait her out.

But what happens if the hive votes a different way? The scout bees don’t hold resentments or filibuster, they simply stop dancing  and go with the flow. Drawing heavily on the ideas of The Honeybee Democracy and the research of author Tom Seeley, Krulwich asks, “would we be better off being more beelike?”

Biologically-induced congeniality sounds like a nice alternative to what we’ve got now, a spitting, snarling mosh pit of politicians. But even so, I don’t wish a bee lobotomy on our senators.

Yes, they are petty, shortsighted blowhards too much of the time. Some have lost the art of compromise. But would I prefer the bee model? A polite, genetically induced quiet? No, I wouldn’t.

I see the advantages, but speaking as an intelligent, free willed mammal, I’m afraid their system seems a little … umm, what’s the word?

Inhuman.

Read the complete article here, or listen in to an earlier interview with Tom Seeley.

j9267[1]You can read more of Tom Seeley’s book The Honeybee Democracy in two ways.

The complete book is available here: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9267.html

A Princeton Shorts titled The Five Habits of Highly Effective Honeybees (and What We Can Learn from Them) is also available through most major e-book retailers. Learn more about this e-book here: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9648.html

Filed Under: Biological Sciences, Birds and Natural History

Introducing a New Biophysics Textbook

February 1, 2013 by

Bialek_Biophysics_caseAre you headed to Philadelphia for the Biophysical Society’s 57th Annual Meeting (#bps13) starting on February 2nd? They are expecting over 6,000 biophysicists to attend. It’s a great opportunity to see what is new in the field. And speaking of what is new in the field, professors and students, you will want to check this out – it is the textbook you’ve been waiting for:

Biophysics: Searching for Principles
by William Bialek

William Bialek provides the first graduate-level introduction to biophysics aimed at physics students. Interactions between the fields of physics and biology reach back over a century, and some of the most significant developments in biology–from the discovery of DNA’s structure to imaging of the human brain–have involved collaboration across this disciplinary boundary. For a new generation of physicists, the phenomena of life pose exciting challenges to physics itself, and biophysics has emerged as an important subfield of this discipline. Featuring numerous problems and exercises throughout, Biophysics emphasizes the unifying power of abstract physical principles to motivate new and novel experiments on biological systems.

–Covers a range of biological phenomena from the physicist’s perspective
–Features 200 problems
–Draws on statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics, and related mathematical concepts
–Includes an annotated bibliography and detailed appendixes
–Instructor’s manual (available only to teachers)
–Illustration Package available
–Supplementary Materials available

William Bialek is the John Archibald Wheeler/Battelle Professor in Physics at Princeton University, where he is also a member of the multidisciplinary Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, and is Visiting Presidential Professor of Physics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the coauthor of Spikes: Exploring the Neural Code.

“Bialek’s excellent book bears the stamp of both his originality and technical prowess. What I look for when I read a book is something unique that I know I won’t find anywhere else. Bialek delivers that in spades on a topic of great interest to scientists of all stripes.”–Rob Phillips, California Institute of Technology

For more information, please visit:
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9911.html

We hope you enjoy Philadelphia and stay warm!

Filed Under: Biological Sciences, Physics, Twitter Tagged With: , , , ,

HOW CLIMATE WORKS symposium, co-sponsored by Princeton University Press and the Princeton Environmental Institute

November 16, 2012 by

On October 12, 2012, Princeton University Press and the Princeton Environmental Institute hosted a day-long symposium titled HOW CLIMATE WORKS. The symposium was held in conjunction with the publication of our latest titles in the well-received Princeton Primers in Climate series.

In this first of ten segments to be posted here the symposium speakers discussed their contributions to the Princeton Primers in Climate series. The introduction remarks were given by Princeton University Press biological sciences editor Alison Kalett and Princeton professor Geoffrey Vallis, author of CLIMATE AND THE OCEANS.

Filed Under: Biological Sciences, Climate Science, Earth Sciences, Habitable Planet, Natural Science, Twitter

Paul Seabright on the Relationship Between the Sexes

October 2, 2012 by

 

Women occupy fewer positions of power in business than men. Why is that? What explains the types of relationships that men have with women and the different ways in which men and women network with friends and acquaintances? In this Social Science Bites podcast, Paul Seabright, author of ‘The War of the Sexes‘, combines an economist’s perspective with insights from biology and evolutionary science to give answers to just these questions.

Filed Under: Anthropology, Biological Sciences, Cognitive Science, Cultural Studies, Mind, Pod/Vodcast, Popular Science, Psychology, Sociology

BOOK FACT FRIDAY

September 21, 2012 by

FACT: “Farming began in Bali with the arrival of the Austronesians, who colonized the Indonesian archipelago between 4,500 and 3,000 years ago. The Austronesians were farmers and fishermen whose agricultural assemblage included pigs, dogs, and chickens; root and tree crops such as coconuts, bananas, taro, and bamboo; and a tool technology that included stone adzes.”

Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali
by J. Stephen Lansing

Along rivers in Bali, small groups of farmers meet regularly in water temples to manage their irrigation systems. They have done so for a thousand years. Over the centuries, water temple networks have expanded to manage the ecology of rice terraces at the scale of whole watersheds. Although each group focuses on its own problems, a global solution nonetheless emerges that optimizes irrigation flows for everyone. Did someone have to design Bali’s water temple networks, or could they have emerged from a self-organizing process?

Perfect Order—a groundbreaking work at the nexus of conservation, complexity theory, and anthropology—describes a series of fieldwork projects triggered by this question, ranging from the archaeology of the water temples to their ecological functions and their place in Balinese cosmology. Stephen Lansing shows that the temple networks are fragile, vulnerable to the cross-currents produced by competition among male descent groups. But the feminine rites of water temples mirror the farmers’ awareness that when they act in unison, small miracles of order occur regularly, as the jewel-like perfection of the rice terraces produces general prosperity. Much of this is barely visible from within the horizons of Western social theory.

The fruit of a decade of multidisciplinary research, this absorbing book shows that even as researchers probe the foundations of cooperation in the water temple networks, the very existence of the traditional farming techniques they represent is threatened by large-scale development projects.

We invite you to read Chapter 1 here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8186.pdf

Filed Under: Anthropology, Asian and Asian American studies, Biological Sciences, Book Fact Friday

Filmmaker and personality Jason Silva finds inspiration awe in Nicholas Humphrey’s SOUL DUST in film short

September 19, 2012 by

Check it out!

Filed Under: Biological Sciences, Cognitive Science, Mind, Philosophy, Twitter
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