ASSIGNMENTS, Evolution Spring 2014

Problem Sets:

SECOND Question set: DUE 17 APRIL
EXAMPLES here

THIRD Question set: DUE 12 MAY

Essays:

There will be THREE essays over the course of the term: the first two will be similar assignments; call the 'critical reviews'.  The third will be a more extended synthetic review; more on this will be forthcoming.

FIRST ESSAY due Monday 24 March

SECOND ESSAY (same idea as first) due Mon 21 April

THIRD ESSAY due 26 May

Third essay expands on the first two; the assignment is to identify several primary research papers (a minimum of three, but more okay) that bear on a particular evolutionary question and, in some way, build on one another or provide mutual insight. They might be a series of papers where researchers are explicitly building on each others' work (for example, some address questions posed or left unanswered by the earlier one(s), or later papers challenge interpretations of the earlier), or they might be less explicitly related but you find a thread in your own interests that connects them.

Your essay should combine a brief overview of each of these studies, along with a discussion -- your synthesis -- of the conceptual threads or arguments that connect them for you. The overviews should be succinct and focus on a) the purpose and general logical structure of the study, b) the findings as they apply to the primary questions posed by the researchers, c) and any open ends, implications, or criticisms that you care to point out (the usual assessment of the effectiveness and productiveness of the work), but with special emphasis on the threads that connect all of the papers reviewed from your perspective. Overviews do NOT need to get into nitty-gritty detail of methods, results, except insofar as that is required for you to make your points, draw your synthetic interpretations.

The remainder of your essay should build the structure that, for you, makes the papers cohere -- why you came to select them as a connected body of work. It should include some thoughts as to where this body of work leaves our understanding and how that is affected by the net contribution of the several pieces of research. And, of course, as always you should include some thinking (either drawn from the thinking of the researchers or from your synthesis of the situation) as to what questions remain open, what further research is interestingly suggested. There are a variety of other components that could go into this synthetic aspect of the essay -- anything that, in your reading and thinking about the papers, emerges as interesting and somehow emerges from the work being reported.

DO NOT TREAT THIS AS A SUMMARY OF A "TOPIC", as in a typical 'term paper',so much as an attempt to use a selected body of work to draw synthetic understanding and to think about what it implies. The focus is more on your thinking than on summarizing 'current understanding'.  Reflect on research ideas and their linkage and how they lead to new questions, rather than writing an encyclopedia article.

Think in terms of 8-10 pages for this one.

If you are having trouble choosing papers or refining your ideas for a starting point, talk to me (sooner rather than later).