The scenario: . The editors of the magazine have asked you to submit an article that includes the theme of your article, a summary of each of three main scientific publications that you will focus on, a brief discussion of how these publications agree/disagree and what pattern in observations or support for hypotheses arises from this, and a statement of the things that future researchers should concentrate on in order for this field of research to progress. The better the story you can tell, the more likely it is that the magazine will buy your article. The themes: Scientific American is looking for articles on the following large themes: (1) Inferring behavior from the fossil record (2) Evolution of sexual dimorphism (3) Sexual selection as a mechanism driving evolution (4) Understanding the past movements of animals (5) Human mediated selection (6) Evolutionary origins of unique traits and characters (7) Understanding mechanisms that drive variation (8) Convergent evolution as an evolutionary mechanism(9) Evolution of social systems (10) Unique adaptations in humans Each theme has a ‘seed’ paper that you must use as one of the three publications covered by your article. But the seed paper is not the theme; the seed paper will allow you to address the theme. See comment below re. subthemes. The references for these papers are at the end of this instruction guide. General instructions: You may work singly or in pairs (see syllabus). Choose one of the above 10 major themes. If the theme seems too broad, you can select a smaller subtheme. If you choose to focus on a subtheme, this should be clear from the introduction and ideally also the title. Download the seed paper for that theme (for some you will need to use the library system, in order to do this). Select two papers published in peer-reviewed scientific journals that address the (sub) theme. This will require initial examination of a lot more than two papers! Try searching for key words using Google Scholar or Web of Science. Looking in the references of the focal paper will also help. Make sure that the authors of the two papers you select have taken an evolutionary approach. None of these papers may be literature reviews; rather, each must be primary literature, presenting novel data collected and analyzed by the authors. However, review papers (e.g. from the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution) may be a good source of background information for you, as they should help to summarize the field. None of the papers (including the seed paper) may have the same first or last author or the same combination of authors. You should strive to select papers that together present an interesting and coherent story. The story might involve different interpretations of data among authors, conflicting patterns among datasets, changes in dominant hypotheses over time, different lines of evidence coming together to provide a broader picture, etc. Note: if you don’t understand the seed paper at all, you may want to choose a different theme!