Systems Ethology--The Life and Work of Bland Ewing

This site is dedicated to the life and work of Bland Ewing. Bland identified his research work as quantitative population ethology, but it may be more appropriate today to use the phrase systems ethology. These pages have substantial content about systems ethology, as well as a biography of Bland Ewing and connections to other related topics.

I am writing Bland’s biography, and have actively worked with him and others on his ideas on population ethology modeling. For original, see http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~yandell/ewing/. More will be added over time.

My Involvement with Bland Ewing

Bland Ewing was my first mentor. I worked for him at UC-Berkeley during the summers while I was an undergrad at Caltech in the early 1970s. By the late 1970s we lost touch, and only reconnected in the mid 1990s. At that time, Bland was suffering in a serious way from Huntington’s Disease, the same malady that took his father, grandfather, and Woody Guthrie. Bland Ewing died in the early 2000s. His mind was quite active to the last day, though he was largely confined to his apartment and later a nursing home due to low energy and difficulty walking. Bland’s short-term memory in those last years was sporadic, and he ocasionally has trouble with names, but his depth of reasoning was phenomenal.

During the early 2000s, Bland and I, along with Jim Barbieri and Bob Luck, reviewed modeling ideas that Bland first proposed in his intended dissertation. As near as any of us can tell, these ideas had not been superseded in the past quarter century. Today, in the 2020s, these seem relevant and actionable at scale given advances in data and computing capabilities.

Ewing Bibliography

Current Work

Unpublished Work from the 1970s

These require password access. These are located in Yandell’s work google drive Brian Yandell/Ewing/Ewing_Papers_Working_Versions/1970s_Manuscripts.

  • P Bunnell (1973) A stochastic model of a lizard community. PhD Thesis, University of California, Berkeley.
  • JF Barbieri (1974) “A method for modeling sparse systems”, memorandum to JB Knox, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, 29 Apr 1974.
  • JF Barbieri (1975) “Progress report on modeling structured ecosystems using Monte Carlo techniques,” Memorandum to JB Knox, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, 1 Jul 1975.
  • JF Barbieri (1975) “Problems with modeling structured ecosystems and the EPA-SBNF project,” Memorandum to JB Knox, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, 13 Jun 1975.
  • BS Yandell (1978) “Random numbers: where do they come from?” project for D Brillinger’s Time Series course, UC Berkeley, 7 Apr 1978.

Quantitative Population Ethology Software

We are developing software to implement the quantitative population ethology simulation approach using the R statistical computing system.

Please read the Practical Model Building paper for detailed information on our code. First one needs to install the R system, however. See the R Project for instructions.