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PRELIMINARY
SYLLABUS Sexual
Selection and Kinship Anth-627 |
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Wednesdays, 9:00 to 12:00
pm (to be confirmed based on students needs) 419 University Museum (Eiseley Seminar Room) |
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INSTRUCTOR Eduardo Fernandez-Duque URL:
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~eduardof/ Few themes are so intimately and persistently woven through the discipline of primatology as those of sexual selection and kinship, two factors thought to play a major role in the evolution and expression of primate sociality and behavior. Sexual selection, including selection on particular traits stemming from direct reproductive competition among members of each sex, as well as traits arising through intersexual mate choice and intersexual conflict, has arguably driven the evolution of a wide range of both morphological and behavioral traits in primates. And kinship, the relatedness among the various individuals comprising a population, is widely accepted as a key explanatory principle, often the primary one, underlying and structuring much of primate social lives. In this graduate seminar course, we will explore the current state of theory and empirical research on both sexual selection and kinship in primate evolutionary ecology through discussion of a wide range of reviews and empirical studies. Our discussions will focus on critically evaluating the evidence that sexual selection and kinship indeed have played and continue to play key roles in the evolution and maintenance of particular features of primate morphology, behavior, and social organization.
For our readings, we will take as our point of departure three fairly-recently published edited volumes – two on sexual selection and one on kinship – with additional materials pieced together from a variety of other sources. These are some of the primary texts we will use:
Each week's reading assignments will focus on a specific topic and will include several general articles that provide an overview of the topic for that week, along with a series of relevant references mainly from the recent primary literature. Most of these will focus on nonhuman primates, although where appropriate, we will also delve into the literature on humans. The full set of readings for each week is accessed by clicking the hyperlink on the appropriate date in the Class Schedule below. Where possible, I will make PDF versions of the assigned readings available. Note that the list of weekly readings may be updated or revised as we progress through the semester, depending on the class's interests and motivations.
- Leading and Participating in Seminar Discussions - Your preparation for and participation in class discussions each week will constitute 50% of your final grade for this course. Simply put, you must CONTRIBUTE to this seminar, each and every week, in order to get a good grade. You will contribute in two ways. First, during the course of the semester, each student will LEAD one or two of our discussion sessions depending on the number of students enrolled. Leading discussion does not mean simply summarizing the readings! Rather, I will expect you to open the class by highlighting the key points of interest and controversy about the topic(s) we are discussing for the day in a brief presentation (15 minutes max). Then, it will be your responsibility to direct and moderate the rest of the class in discussing the readings: choosing the order in which we discuss them, the attention we pay to each one, raising specific issues or posing questions for us to talk about, etc. As the discussion leader for a particular week, you will need to review the readings and topic I have suggested AT LEAST ONE WEEK in advance of the session you are responsible for and, through an email correspondence with me, suggest one to two additional relevant papers from the primary literature to add to our assigned readings. Second, during those weeks when you are not leading the seminar, you must actively PARTICIPATE in our discussions, offering your own comments, critiques, and questions. I truly believe that the best way for anyone to really become familiar with any issue or topic is to read about it, ask questions about it, challenge it, argue over it, and so on. That is why class participation is absolutely essential! Thus, I expect each and every student in the seminar to have read and thought about all of the assigned materials before coming to class and for you to DEMONSTRATE this. I will also expect you all to be engaged with the seminar leader, with me, and with one another while in class. Do not be surprised if I or the seminar leader put you on the spot with a question or ask for your comments on particular issues. - Summarizing Discussions - For each of our weekly sessions, one student will be assigned to prepare, for the rest of the class, a SUMMARY of our session. This is not a summary of the week's readings but a distillation of the high points of our discussion: the key ideas covered, insights reached, main points made, and by whom. Think of them as the "minutes" of the seminar. As a summarizer, you should take lots of notes during the session, from which you will need to distill the key points, making explicit why these are important. Summarizers should email me their summaries as an MS Word document not later than 5PM the day after class, and I will then distribute the summaries to the rest of the class. Your performance as a summarizer will constitute 10% of your final grade. - Writing Assignments and Position Paper Discussions - The remainder of your grade is based on four short written assignments ("position papers"), each 10% of your final grade. These papers should be 3 (minimum) to 4 (maximum) single-spaced pages in length, and they are your chance to explore in more depth an issue, question, or controversy raised by the readings and our discussion during the previous several weeks. Position papers will be shared (anonymously) with your classmates. In your papers, you should both DESCRIBE the issue you have chosen to focus on and OUTLINE YOUR POSITION on that issue based on your critical evaluation of the literature. In formulating your positions and writing your papers, I expect you to do some significant additional scholarly research and go beyond the set of readings assigned for class. These papers should not be simply literature reviews. The two main objectives for these papers are to help you organize YOUR ideas about a particular topic, and to give you practice in articulating those ideas in a concise way. You will not be graded on the position you take, but rather on how coherently and cogently you present and defend that position. Your position papers should be emailed to me as MS Word documents by midnight on the dates they are due. These are the Wednesdays of weeks 5 (Oct 6th), 7 (Oct 20th), 11 (Nov 17th), and 13 (Dec 1st). I will then distribute them to the rest of the class. You should read your classmates' position papers and, by the beginning of the following Week's class, send me an email "voting" for the one (other than your own) that you found most interesting or compelling of that week's bunch and why. For the final session in each half of the course, we will all reread and discuss the position papers with the most "votes". Each of your position papers will be worth 10% of your grade, thus the writing component of this course is worth 40% of your total final grade.
CLASS
SCHEDULE (tentative, to be confirmed once
number of students in class is confirmed)
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