TERM PAPER GUIDELINES
As noted in the syllabus, one thing you will have to do for the course is a paper on some evolutionary topic of your choice. The purpose of this is to acquaint you in depth with a small part of evolution that may be of some interest to you and to give you some experience in writing scientific literature. In depth is a key phrase; I don't want general topics and superficial papers. As much as possible (given the constraints that our library places), I expect you to use original journal literature for your information. Texts, anthologies, popular magazines, newspapers, Wikipedia, etc. can be used as starters, but make an effort not to use them as primary sources of material.
This is a scientific term paper and, as such, should follow norms for scientific literature; don't use the norms of a history or english paper. The differences are especially noticeable in the citations: no footnotes at all, author and year citation in the text, etc. Consult any journal listed below for pointers on organization, style, and referencing procedures. If you still have questions, feel free to consult with me.
Although you are summarizing original literature in some area of the evolutionary sciences, I expect you to write the summaries in your own words. Extensive use of direct quotes will result in a reduction of at least a half grade on the paper. The magnitude of the reduction will depend on the magnitude of your usage of quoted material. Use of quoted material that is not surrounded by quotation marks and referenced appropriately is a form of plagiarism. See below for my treatment of plagiarism in a paper.
It is required that you consult with me regarding the topic of your paper before you begin writing it. If you are having difficulty about selecting a topic, consult with me also. In any event, this consultation should occur on or before October 1, 2015. Failure to consult will cost you a half grade.
I would expect the papers to be on average 10-15 pages in length, but this is not a hard and fast rule. Really, they should be just as long as they need to be as long as they say what needs to be said in a concise manner. Below is a list of possible topics. The list is not exhaustive; I emphasize that you can pick any evolutionary topic you wish. The list below is general categories, too general in most cases to be the subject of a paper. It is up to you to narrow the topic in some way to be able to write an in depth paper.
1. Each chapter of the text has at the end questions and a literature section. General topics are given there along with references to classic papers and review papers on that topic. That might be helpful to get you started on topic selection and a literature search. Also you might scan the text in search of items that you might be of interest to you as possible paper topics.
2. Behavioral or evolutionary ecology - pick some organismal characteristic and discuss something about its adaptiveness and evolution. Sample characters could include: N-fixation, dioecy in plants, homeothermy, monogamy or polygamy as a mating system, preferences in taste or some other sense, resistance to antibiotics or pesticides, sexual reproduction, body coloration schemes, mimicry, sex ratio selection, sexual differences in selection, feathers, aggressiveness, allelopathy, plant-animal coevolution, predator-prey arms races, evolutionarily stable strategies (ESS models).
3. Population genetics - sample topics could be: frequency dependent selection, punctuation vs gradualism, neutralist-selectionist gene controversy, meiotic drive, polymorphisms, applications of electrophoresis, genesis of variation, hopeful monster theories, levels of selection (genome, individual, kin, group, community), mutation dynamics, founder effects, genetic load, genetic drift, gene flow, evolutionary bottlenecks, selection experiments, speciation (allopatric, sympatric, parapatric), species hybridizations.
4. Historical evolution - nomothetics vs idiographics, numerical vs classical taxonomy, cladistics, chemical evolution, stellar evolution, cosmogeny. Pick any form of life and discuss its evolutionary history or biogeography, mass extinctions and causes, effects of continental drift. adaptive radiation, adaptive zones, homology and analogy, geographic variation of traits
5. Molecular and developmental biology - developmental constraints on evolutionary change, evolution and morphogenesis, neoteny, heterochrony, gene control heirarchies, homeotic mutants, atavisms, ontogeny and phylogeny, neutral DNA, repetitive DNA segments, selfish genes, gene switching, jumping genes, coadapted gene complexes, developmental or genetic homeostasis.
6. Human evolution - historical development, primate evolution, hominid evolution, discuss the evolution of such characteristics as bipedalism, tool use, intelligence, culture, speech, or religion. The sociobiology controversy, eugenics controversies, evolutionary aspects of recombinant DNA research.
7. Evolution and society - some specific aspect of the creationism-evolution argument, social Darwinism, the Scopes trial, the Huxley debates, evolutionary thought in non-Christian cultures, impact of evolutionary thought in areas other than the natural sciences, evolution in the schools.
Some U of S journals with Evolution related Papers
Ecology
Ecological Monographs
The American Naturalist
Journal of Animal Ecology
Animal Behaviour
Behaviour
Evolution
Quarterly Review of Biology
Genetics
Behavioral Ecology
Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology
Genetical Research
Journal of Heredity
Molecular Biology and Evolution
Trends in Genetics
Some evolutionary papers appear in Science, Scientific American, American Scientist, Nature, Proceedings of the NAS
Edited volumes that are helpful are: Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, Advances in Ecological Research, Perspectives in Ethology, Cold Spring Harbor Symposium, Annual Review of Genetics, Oxford Surveys in Evolutionary Biology. Such reviews are not original literature, but they are a good place to find no end of original references.� Check the stacks and catalogues for others. You can also check with me.
Searches on the Web in general are not recommended because there is often no way of knowing whether the information you are getting is the result of legitimate refereed science or just the idle ramblings of your typical web idiot. There are means of searching original literature on the Web though. Probably the easiest way to get into them is to go to the Weinberg Memorial Library's electronic indices page, http://matrix.scranton.edu/academics/wml/databases-subjects/biology.shtml, and get links from there. Probably the most useful would be MEDLINE, JSTOR, WILSON WEB, or PROQUEST. Google Scholar is also a good area to search for original literature. Any web citations in your paper must be in reference to primary literature (NB: not all literature in the library databases is primary; ask me if you have any doubts). Web citations that derive from newspapers, popular magazines, other student papers, my or other professor's class notes or handouts, or any other non-primary website will lead to an automatic reduction of a half grade on the paper; if I feel that such web citations are substantial, I will deduct a full letter grade from the paper.
Plagiarism of any sort will not be tolerated in your paper. If,
upon reading your paper, I suspect any plagiarism, I will scan and submit your
paper to turnitin.com for analysis. Turnitin.com is a service that
compares your writing to anything that exists already online or in their own
extensive term paper files. If the analysis shows any plagiarism, I will
deduct 2 full letter grades off the paper.
THE
PAPER IS DUE ON OR BEFORE NOVEMBER 24, 2015.
YOU THUS HAVE THREE MONTHS NOTICE TO WORK ON THIS PAPER. GIVEN THAT AMOUNT OF TIME, I WILL ACCEPT NO EXCUSES AT ALL FOR NOT GETTING THE PAPER IN ON TIME. ANY PAPERS TURNED IN AFTER THE ABOVE DATE WILL RECEIVE AN AUTOMATIC REDUCTION OF ONE FULL LETTER GRADE; PAPERS MORE THAN 2 DAYS LATE WILL RECEIVE A REDUCTION OF 2 FULL LETTER GRADES.