Absolutely, use the post in the newsletter, that would be great.

And thanks for telling me about the Devore-Wilson (EO, I assume) school. It makes me wish there had been some horizontal transfer at Harvard but I know that personalities and politics have ways of intervening.

What I liked about your post (well, many things but in particular) is filling out what we mean when we are teaching an evolution that informs. The 4-whys make you think and as you noted at the outset, what it means to find a good question to answer.

You know an authority on teaching biology at the hs level have you ever asked or discussed this with her? Which is a not too indirect way of saying, if you did, what did she say.

I write a column for the MnSTA newsletter and I’m thinking I might want to use your post for a way into the next one. If I do, I’ll attribute you but want to ask whether I have your permission.

Thanks, Greg.

I sometimes see the ultimate/proximate dichotomy used in college texts. But the use of this approach comes from the Devore-Wilson school. DeVore and Wilson never worked on anything together, but their students ran their classes and were responsible for much of the curriculum, and this approach was heavily used sometimes explicitly and always implicitly.

I’m pretty sure Jay Phelan’s college bio textbook (and bio and physiology) uses this, because he and I are Suaboya, and Suaboya always use the Tinbergan approach.

I’m not sure either that they are to be found in much college science and if you know that they are I’d love to know. When I think about school biology the developmental readiness of students to deal with a Tinbergian Inquisition seems problematic (AP, IB or an independently developed course?).

An issue, of course, is time, the time it would take to get students to this level and to provide them sufficient experiences to be comfortable with it.

I enjoyed your analysis using GROTI and think it is valuable. I wonder how much it is used in seminars based on papers in behavior. And I enjoyed the prod to think about Tinbergen and his stable of students whose field work remains astonishing. How clever and how focused they were on finding good questions to answer.

Thanks for this post and your posts in general.

Cheers.