Your assignment is to:

(1) Provide a summary of the research described in the article:

Summarize the introduction and rationale for the research (at least 2 paragraphs). What led the authors to investigate this aspect of evolution? How does it fit into a theoretical framework that other research has addressed? What specific question(s) was being asked?

Summarize the methods used in sufficient detail for someone to understand who has not read the paper (at least 2 paragraphs). You do not need to use the specific jargon for very technical methodology. For example, technical details about the statistical methods are not necessary (e.g. log-transformed data), but do capture what hypothesis each test was designed to address.

Describe the results in one or more short paragraphs. This section can be dry, but that is ok. Summarize how each test turned out. Don’t refer to figures, just summarize what they show.

Summarize the discussion section (at least 2 paragraphs). How did the authors place the results into the theoretical framework described in the introduction? Did they propose new theories or new experiments to test ideas brought up by the results?

(2) Provide a personal reaction to the article (final 2 or more paragraphs). You can respond in a number of ways. Here are some ideas:

Critique it: Do you think this was a good paper? Was it testing an important or interesting idea? Was the experimental design or methodology sufficient to address the hypothesis being tested? Was it well written and organized?

Demonstrate article’s relevance: How did the article fit within the course as a whole? What theories or ideas from the textbook, coursework, or lectures were discussed in the article?

Where to go from here: Propose a new research project that could serve to build on the work presented. This can be as straightforward as describing how you could perform a similar experiment with a different species that has traits in common (but might differ in certain ways) with the species described in the article. Or you could propose an idea to test an alternative hypothesis using the same research organisms as those described in the article. Be sure to relate any new experiment to the results from this article.