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Skidmore College
First-Year Experience

Scribner Seminar Program
Course Description

Food, Groups and Mates: Evolution, Culture and Choice

Instructor(s): Monica Raveret-Richter, Biology

Description: What will you eat? Which group will you join, and what sorts of relationships will exist among group members? With whom will you share, fight, mate, or raise young? Insects, birds, social carnivores, and primates, including humans, all face these choices. What determines their behavior? In this seminar, students will compare the choice behavior of a broad variety of animals, and explore relationships among resource quality, distribution, and control, mating systems, and the structure of families and societies from both evolutionary and cultural perspectives. Students will bring evidence and methodologies from the natural and social sciences to bear on the patterns and relationships under study, and will determine where generalizations regarding the determinants of choice behavior might be possible, and where caution in making broad generalizations is warranted.

 

Course Offered