代写Commentary Assignment Biological Basis of Behaviour

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Commentary Assignment

Biological Basis of Behaviour

Lateness penalty for final assignment: 5% of assignment per day or part thereof,

including weekends.

Drafts are scored all or none: late drafts do not receive any grades.

The writing assignments, drafts and final submission, should be uploaded onto iLearn, in

Word or pdf format. Upload links in the bottom Box.

Assignment

The assignment is to take one of the 3 articles below, and write a short summary and

commentary describing the article and its significance to human life today. Imagine that you

are writing for a general audience interested in science. Envisage writing a short news focus

article for Science or Nature, one of the most prestigious scientific journals. It would be a

good idea to peruse some issues of these journals for their science news sections. Be sure to

write the assignment in your own words and not plagiarize or copy or paraphrase from other

sources. In case of plagiarism, marks will be deducted, or you may not receive comments for

the first draft of this assignment.

The summary article consists of:

• a title, with an optional subtitle

• maximum 1,000 words of body (not including title, references, figure caption)

• references in the departmental Harvard style (anything that you cite in your summary,

including of course the article that you are summarising)

• 1 figure with a caption

In terms of mechanics, put the title first, on a page together with your name. Add the word

count for the body of the text (not the whole piece) on the title page. Don’t put on the title

page the authors, titles or anything else about the article that you are summarising. That

information has to be in the body, which comes next in the assignment. The references then

follow, with a header “References” before them. Be sure to put references in the departmental

Harvard style. Finally come the figure and caption, in either order or both on the same page.

Submit a draft of the complete summary article for 1 point. Tutors will give some comments

in the week after the draft is due, on the paper in the submission box using comment ‘bubbles’

inserted via Grademark, the marking system in turnitin.

The idea

So much for the mechanics. The idea of this assignment is to write a readable, interesting

commentary for a general audience. Think of your peers as audience, not your teachers. The

main idea is to 1) convey a summary of the authors’ main findings, and 2) to comment on its

significance for human life and human society today. The point of the figure is to enliven the

piece by providing some relevant illustration. Your figure should relate to and illustrate what

you are writing, and you should refer to the figure in your text. You have complete freedom in

choosing what to illustrate, whether it is a piece of scientific machinery, a graph from the

paper, or a person of interest. You can draw a figure yourself, scan something, or get it by

Googling. The piece will not be graded on the artistic quality of the figure (i.e., we don’t

expect any Photoshop job or excellence in drawing). Hopefully, it’s a bit of fun to find a

picture for illustration. Be sure to indicate (cite) the source from which you obtained the

figure. Write your own caption, and do not plagiarise the caption from the source (if any).

Readability, comprehensibility, and interest are desiderata. Technical wizardry, use of a

maximum amount of jargon, and lingo to ‘impress your teacher’ are not desiderata.

How would you present the most important ideas from the article in the most comprehensible

and most interesting way? That is your task.

The paper is short, and the word limits are to be taken seriously. Don’t ramble on: concise

writing is at a premium. Make your words do substantial punching. Besides describing the

most important results and findings, your job is to comment on the relevance and importance

of the work for our lives today. For topics to comment on, you might check some of the

citations in your target paper for relevant background, and look for others who have cited the

target paper (Cited reference search). We are not expecting a critique of the science, its

methodology, theoretical strengths and weaknesses, etc. Such a task requires quite a bit more

training than what first-year students have had. Rather, your task is to relate the findings to

our lives and our world, indicating how they impact on issues significant to human society

today. A good comment adds something new to what the authors are saying, not simply reiterating

what the authors said with another reference or two added. This part should not come

across in style as formal philosophy. As a news article, your task is to keep it newsy. Keep the

language to simple, every-day terms, but without descending into slang and colloquialisms

inappropriate for a science news story. We think that the significance of each of these pieces

will pop out. Each target article has no shortage of topics to comment on.

Standards Based Evaluation: general description

High distinction

Outstanding quality of description in terms of both comprehensibility and interest in the

presentation of the key ideas, with due attention to some relevant and appropriate literature

surrounding the summarised article. Highly interesting presentation of commentary. Topnotch

journalistic writing quality.

Distinction

Superior very good quality of description in terms of both comprehensibility and interest in

the presentation of the key ideas. Interesting commentary. Very good writing quality.

Credit

Good quality of description in terms of both comprehensibility and interest in the

presentation, along with comprehensible commentary. Good writing quality. Captures and

presents key ideas in the summarised article.

Pass

Captures and presents key ideas in the summarised article. The reader can make out what is

being conveyed.

Fail

Fails to summarise key ideas. Virtually incomprehensible to read.

A fuller rubric will be used for grading.

Choice of articles to summarise, with brief description and some related pieces

It is your job to find the target articles, and any other references. You must comment on

one of the target articles, and not on something else.

Note that these are not listed in the Department’s Harvard style.

Choice 1 on Planet

Scott P. Carroll et al. Applying evolutionary biology to address global challenges. Science

Magazine, 2014, 346, 1245993.

It is about applying evolutionary principles to problems stemming from some things that

adapt too fast for our good, and some things that adapt too slow. Both these fronts encompass

a number of societal issues.

Choice 2 on evolutionary medicine

Caroline Davis, 2014. Evolutionary and neuropsychological perspectives on addictive

behaviors and addictive substances: relevance to the “food addiction” construct.

Substance Abuse and Rehabilitation, v. 5, 129-137.

Applying a Darwinian medical perspective, the paper examines evolutionary considerations

on the topics of gambling, recreational drug use, and even bad habits in food consumption. No

shortage of stuff to comment on.

Choice 3 on brain

Grégoire Courtine and Jocelyne Bloch (2015) Defining Ecological Strategies in

Neuroprosthetics. Neuron, v. 86, April 8, 2015, pp. 29-33.

This paper treats the CNS as an ecosystem, and applies what the authors called ecological

principles of recycle, reuse, and reduce when it comes to neuroprosthetics (using the brain

directly to control prosthetic devices, something we discuss in lectures) and neuromodulation.

It is short but you need to dig up a lot of background on the topic from other papers.

Related papers (which are NOT targets for the commentary assignment)

Choice 1

Microbiology of the anthropocene. MR Gillings, IT Paulsen, Anthropocene 5, 1-8, 2014

Andy Sih, Understanding variation in behavioural responses to human-induced rapid

environmental change: a conceptual overview. Animal Behaviour, 85 (2013) 1077-

1088

Check the extensive reference list in Carroll et al.’s paper.

代写Commentary Assignment Biological Basis of Behaviour

Choice 2

Nesse RM, Berridge KC. 1997 Psychoactive drug use in evolutionary perspective. Science

278(5335): 63–66.

Andrea K. Garber and Robert H. Lustig. Is Fast Food Addictive? Current Drug Abuse

Reviews, 2011, 4, 146-162

Edward H. Hagen, Casey J. Roulette and Roger J. Sullivan 2013. Explaining human

recreational use of ‘pesticides’ Frontiers in psychiatry, 4, 142

Pardis Pedram et al. 2013 Food Addiction: Its Prevalence and Significant Association with

Obesity in the General Population. PLoS One, vol 8, e74832

Marcello Spinella 2003, EVOLUTIONARY MISMATCH, NEURAL REWARD CIRCUITS,

AND PATHOLOGICAL GAMBLING. Intern. J. Neuroscience, 113:503–512, 2003

Choice 3

KWOK, R. (2013) Once more, with feeling. Nature, 497, 176-178. (See refs therein.)

Sliman J. Bensmaia and Lee E. Miller, 2014, Restoring sensorimotor function through

intracortical interfaces: progress and looming challenges. Nature Reviews

Neuroscience, v. 15, 313-325 (a review of research on neuroprosthetics)

Sydney S. Cash and Leigh R. Hochberg 2014, The Emergence of Single Neurons in Clinical

Neurology. Neuron, v. 86, 79-91

COLLINGER, J. L., WODLINGER, B., DOWNEY, J. E., WANG, W., TYLER-KABARA,

E. C., WEBER, D. J., MCMORLAND, A. J. C., VELLISTE, M., BONINGER, M. L.

& SCHWARTZ, A. B. (2013) High-performance neuroprosthetic control by an

individual with tetraplegia. Lancet, 381, 557-564.

Brain-controlled neuromuscular stimulation to drive neural plasticity and functional recovery.

C Ethier, JA Gallego and LE Miller. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 2015, 33:95–

102

Volker M. Tronnier and Dirk Rasche 2014 Deep Brain Stimulation. In: H. Knotkova and D.

Rasche (eds.), Textbook of Neuromodulation, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4939-1408-1_6

(step by step explication of deep brain stimulation)
代写Commentary Assignment Biological Basis of Behaviour