There are two reasons why you might have come to this page... Either you are interested in my research, or you are interested in dinosaurs, or you think you might have known me personally... three... there are three reasons why you might have come to this page... Okay, actually there are four. You might be here by accident.

If you’re here by accident, perhaps you’ll stay for one of the other three reasons. If you think you might have known me in a past life, my Monty Python reference in the preceding paragraph might have helped. This might help too ‒ I still look something like this, though I look less like that now than I did in August of 1998.

At some point I will place a short biography on this page in case the picture still isn’t enough. In the mean time, if you want me to deny that I ever knew you, you can write to me.

As for dinosaurs, I did not mean to imply that I am one. I will not be the first of my kind to shed my false ski... I mean, I am not and never have been a dinosaur. However, since February 1st, 1994, I have owned what I think is still the best (read, most topically informative) dinosaur list on the net. You can be the judge by looking at the archives. For more on the dinosaur list, see its home page.

My research interests are somewhat varied, but revolve around how animals use vision to learn about the world around them. I’m particularly fascinated by the diversity of animal visual systems and how different animals can and do extract different bits of information from their environment. I’m currently tinkering with some web pages that describe comparative color vision, and you should look at those for a tutorial on the subject. I’ve also started to develop a separate research interests page, but it is currently terse and jargony. I will someday modify it to make it more broadly accessible. In the mean time, you can find long-winded and jargony descriptions in my papers downloadable through links on this page (and also on my research interests page and my Publications page).

Some of the projects I’ve been working on involve a technique that I call “functional substitution”. The basic idea is to try to understand the visual capabilities of other animals (or even other people) by utilizing what we know about differences between their sensory biology and ours. The goal is to reproduce in the sensory neurons of a human subject, the activity of sensory neurons in the animal that you’re studying... in essence, substituting the function of the other animal’s neurons for that of the neurons in the human subject. We’ve applied the technique to ask questions about the evolution of color vision in New World monkeys:

If you want to see how my colleagues and I think threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) may use color to find and select mates (or threats), the original publication is available at springerlink.com. Or you can get my copy:

Rowe, M.P., Baube, C.L., Loew, E.R., and Phillips, J.B. (2004). “Optimal mechanisms for finding and selecting mates: how threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) should encode male throat colors”, Journal of Comparative Physiology A, 190:241-256.     582 KB.       (© Springer-Verlag; The original publication is available at http://www.springerlink.com.)

For more on stickleback and color, see: Rowe, M.P., Baube, C.L., and Phillips, J.B. (2006). “Trying to See Red through Stickleback Photoreceptors: Functional Substitution of Receptor Sensitivities”, Ethology, 112(3):218-229. That link will take you to the abstract at the Blackwell Synergy® website. Write to me if you’d like to find out what I can tell you about similarity and differences between human and stickleback color processing and you don’t have free access to the article via Blackwell Synergy®.

I have also written on comparative color vision in:

Rowe, M.P. (2000). “Inferring the Retinal Anatomy and Visual Capacities of Extinct Vertebrates”, Palaeontologia Electronica, 3(1):art. 3. 43 pp., 4.9 MB.

on biophysics of waveguiding through photoreceptors in:

and:

and on potential useage of optical polarization as a means to see through scattering media in:

and:

In my earlier days, I also once spent some time trying to find the origins of the claim that we only use 10% of our brains. I wrote up what I found for an article in the Arizona Skeptic. Alternatively you can get my translated PDF version.

Also some time in the early 1990’s I sent some posts to talk.origins on the evolution of color vision. Those posts were deemed worthy of being perpetually archived. I’d like to find time to update them, but until I do, you can at least see the original.

If you looked at the talk.origins stuff and feel you haven’t been punished enough for it, you can see:

That paper should be freely available via the link I’ve provided. If you can’t get it, feel free to ask me for a copy.

Much of my research, from data collection to data analysis, is carried out with Matlab®. Some of the tools that I’ve developed for my own work might be useful for others. I plan to start making them available to anyone to use as they wish (provided they acknowledge my contribution). You can see what I’m offering by going here.

This page was last touched on April 13, 2007

© Mickey P. Rowe, 2004 - 2007