CDarwin

Bah, genetics. There are just too many fields of research.

Bah, I forgot embryology too. And computer science. Environmental Biology can go into ecology, though, can't it?

Oh, blast, forgot engineering.

I'm curious as to the primary fields of interest of some of our students and practicing scientists. So if you will, choose the option that best fits your major or specialty as a researcher. I've tried to be fairly comprehensive, but I realize that there might be a few more options in the life, social, and earth sciences as those are really what I know about.

I guess this is a British thing?

Oh, no, no, the Knoxville Zoo just has a pair of Aldabran tortoises and a big copper statue of one in a setting a lot like that one and I thought "Hey, are you from East Tennessee?" but I guess not. You should go to the Knoxville Zoo sometime, though, and contribute to our tax base. We would appreciate that. There are more female than male practicing primatologists. Someone even wrote a paper about it in American Anthropologist. Fedigan, Linda Marie. American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 96, No. 3. (Sep., 1994), pp. 529-540.

It mostly just recapitulates what the BBC article says, but thank you.

I won't say that I'm completely following what this debate is about, but perhaps relevant to the original post, the number of mutations incurred in a period of time (so called "mutation pressure") is fairly over-rated in vis-a-vis the rate of evolutionary change. The majority of variation in a sexually reproducing population (like that of humans) is due to recombination during sexual reproduction, and the majority of evolutionary change is due simply to selection based on the variation introduced by recombination.

"Finds test human origins theory" From the BBC Science and Nature. I don't have access to Nature to read the real article, so I'm just going by the BBC. Here's the New Scientist article that I can only read the first paragraph of. A Professor Spoor, quoted in the article, appears to feel that because of this discovery of Homo erectus and Homo habilis living at the same time, "[The idea that Homo erectus descended from an isolated populuation of Homo habilis] is a much more complex proposition [than peripatric speciation], the easiest way to interpret these fossils is that there was an ancestral species that gave rise to both of them somewhere between two and three million years ago." Now why is that? Peripatric speciation is where a small founder population is isolated from a larger population in a different environment and speciates rapidly. In the mean time the mother population continues to change at its same, slow rate. That seems perfectly parsimonious. Is it really simper to think that H. habilis and H. erectus speciated at a roughly equal rate and time from an earlier species? I realize I should note that the scenario that Spoor describes could itself be the result of peripatric speciation happening twice, but that would ruin the alliteration. I think you can tell what I'm getting at. I'm just not feeling particularly eloquent today. EDIT: I remembered that I still have an ETSU account so I do have access to Nature, so I'm going to read that article.

That's not the Knoxville Zoo turtle is it?

It was of a fair amount of importance for us.

In the US a professor is just someone who teaches collage classes. It's a career. In much of Europe, a professor is someone who has been given a particular chair at a university. It's a specific achievement. Just in case you don't want to sludge through the Wiki article.

To tempt us. Although I do see your argument that being a male is inherently awesomer than being a female.

I think that the lemur won't fly, but is what I think the same as how a hypothesis is phrased?

Say you're framing an hypothesis for an experiment. Should you phrase the hypothesis so that it's a positive statement even if you personally expect to see a negative result? For Example: "If I throw a lemur it will fly." I would expect for a lemur not to fly if I were to throw it, but should I phrase the hypothesis positively anyway for when it is to be tested?

That's what I was planning. I've had another thought... What if I were to study the reaction of the zoo's blue monkeys to the alarm calls of other primates with which they form polyspecific associations in the wild? I would have to see if the blue monkeys were raised wild or in captivity (actually I know one, the male, is from the Louisiana Purchase Zoo), but it seems like a study like that would partially correct for the social and environmental factors so I'd have fewer variables to deal with. It might be hard to get a hold of recordings from the appropriate animals. Would there be any merit in that?

He couldn't visit Mecca.

When you mention it, I can only think of three PhDed researchers off the top of my head, excluding as 1veedo seems to be students and amateurs and the like. Of course, I only post in the biology forums, so I don't encounter many of the physics or mathematics posters.

Why do you need to lose intelligence to become a food animal?

No, you see there's a difference. We want women around. The sad truth is none of them know what computers are.

For one thing fish have more bones that just the vertebrae, but as for the number, it seems to be ridiculously variable, depending largely on the length. From Comparative Anatomy of the Vertebrates 7 ed. by George C. Kent: "Fish vertebrae are highly diverse, as might be expected in view of the enormous number of species that evolved- greater than in any other class of vertebrates- and the opportunity for subsequent genetic mutations during the lengthy Paleozoic era" (p. 199).

That would be interesting to study, but I'm not sure if I have enough data on the wild population to do that. What I was talking about was more "how many of the wild calls do the captive monkeys make"? Sorry, I should have been more specific there. I thought it could possibly have implications as to understanding the genetic basis of primate behavior. If the calls of the two groups are different, then that could be the result of any number of environmental variables, but if blue monkeys living in their natural habitat and blue monkeys living in the rather extensively modified habitat of a wire feed-silo in Knoxville, Tennessee use the same calls then that might mean that the calls have a substantial genetic component. Thank you for those suggestions, I'll look into those. I have fair access to journals through the UT library and the ETSU library which I can actually access at home since my ETSU password from Governor's School still works. The Knoxville Zoo is kind of tight-lipped about it's animals, though. You have to get your research proposal approved before they'll tell you anything, which seems kind of circular, but I'll work on it.

Ash_wolf and thatbiologyg are liars. Liars!

Alright, I want to do a research project for this Junior Science and Humanities Symposium thing. It has to be original research, well conducted, etc. A lot of people just test other people's hypotheses which is probably a good idea, but being the over-achiever that I am I've decided to come up with my own research question. In short I've gone through about 5 crappy ideas that I couldn't do, and I finally think I've come up with something doable, and I'm just wondering if it's worth doing. I got a list of the all the vocalizations observed in a wild study population of Cercopithecus mits, the blue monkey, from an ethogram published on this site, which I thought was somewhat rare. There's also an article in A Primate Radiation: Evolutionary Biology of the African Guenons using guenon calls for taxonomic purposes, so that might be useful. Other than that I've found a hodgepog of other possibly vaguely useful articles, so if anyone knew of any on the effects of captivity on monkey behavior or the reasons calls are given or anything like that, that would be wonderful too. To rap this up, I want to compare the calls emitted by the wild blue monkeys with those emitted by a pair of captive blue monkeys from the Knoxville Zoo. Does anyone have any comments? Suggestions?

That is true. Washington and Jefferson weren't out hoeing the fields are anything. They were 'planters', not 'farmers' in the sense we would think of.