The Tangled Bank

UWC’s Biodiversity & Conservation Biology Department Pages Serving BDC334, BCB743, and BCB744
Published

August 8, 2022

This website offers material in support of several modules taught by Professor AJ Smit at the Biological and Conservation Biology Department, University of the Western Cape. All my courses are rich in R content. They are:

In addition to the taught material, there are vignettes with some R tricks I have learned over the years, including examples of how to analyse oceanographic and Earth datasets.

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.

— Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, 1859

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Citation

BibTeX citation:
@online{j._smit2022,
  author = {J. Smit, Albertus},
  title = {The {Tangled} {Bank}},
  date = {2022-08-08},
  url = {http://tangledbank.netlify.app/},
  langid = {en}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
J. Smit A (2022) The Tangled Bank. http://tangledbank.netlify.app/.