Each issue of Natural Resources Professional will include an interview with a current SNRE faculty member. This issue, we talk to Professor Bobbi Low, who teaches in the Conservation Biology field of study and joined U-M in 1972.

Please discuss one of your current research projects and why the question is of interest to you?
I’m actually doing two interesting things with students that are great fun. One involves putting together field data on primates (including humans) to look at how maternal strategies change with various costs and benefits of reproduction. For example, does a pregnancy take up a lot, or a little, of the mother’s reproductive lifetime? Is the energy cost of an offspring very high, or relatively low? We’re putting ecological variables in, and seeking what is phylogenetic versus ecological. In another project, we are taking a very general phenomenon across all mammals and looking to see how it plays out in humans across the world: If life is nasty, brutish and short (low life expectancy at birth), you should reproduce early (otherwise you might die first). Biologist have that as a dictum—but the human data are complex and very interesting.

What has changed the most for you as a teacher since coming to the University of Michigan?
I hope I have gotten better at helping students first, learn how to learn, and second, reduce complex principles to intelligible pieces.

What has been one constant during this time?
A colleague once said to me, “You’ll never be a popular teacher because students want answers, and you teach questions.” I thought he was wrong—that students are more capable and interested than that—and I still think so.

What has changed the most about your students?
I think students today write better than when I first started teaching (though they still split infinitives!); other changes come and go—for example, as the economy improves or worsens, students’ interest in theory versus salable skills changes.

If you were given unlimited time and budget, what research project would you undertake?
I have two unfinished book manuscripts. One, “Tomorrow’s Ghosts,” concerns how our evolved predispositions get in the way of changing our habits to be greener (this makes a difference in the strategies we might propose). The second, “Dingoes and Dugongs,” explores how life history (the pacing of lifetime events) and behavior affect the vulnerability of species—things we need to know to be wise in how we attempt to manage, protect or exterminate species.  Had I world enough and time (and money), I’d get these finished!

In 2001, you published “Why Sex Matters: A Darwinian Look at Human Behavior.” This year marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of “The Origin of the Species.” Is Darwin’s stock rising or falling?
The response to this anniversary year really shows that more people, in more fields, are learning why Darwin was (and is) such a powerful force! He was brilliant in really amazing ways. For example, we typically credit the philosopher Karl Popper with the concept of falsifiability (the importance of specifying what observation would prove you wrong) but Darwin used that concept in the Origin. Darwin identified the centrality of both kin selection and sexual selection—but the necessary information wasn’t all in existence yet—so he wisely and openly said he would leave these to future workers. And, a century before demographers began to talk about it, Darwin explicitly recognized what we call today the “quantity-quality trade-off.” An amazing scientist.  The interest is growing not just in the U.S. I was in Guatemala for Darwin’s birthday giving a university-wide Darwin talk.