evolutionary biology – Evaluation Uncertainty

November 3, 2025 jamorell Contributions of Evolutionary Biology and Ecology

Ecology and Evolutionary Biology as Useful for Evaluation – A Very Brief Overview

My presentation at AEA 2025 is an Ignite Session that gives me all of five minutes to make the case that concepts from Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) can be valuable additions to how we think about how programs operate and what they accomplish. This is the one and only slide I am using.

Eat dessert first. Life is uncertain.
Good advice. True observation.

Any yet, we must soldier on, trying to predict what will happen and to explain why things work out as they do. My professional life has grappled with prediction and explanation through the lens of program evaluation. I have come to appreciate how much, and how little, evaluation can tell us. Sometimes it is “much”. Sometime is “little”. Sometimes it is “much” and “little” at the same time. This blog expresses my engagement with what evaluation can do, what it cannot do, what it should do, and what it should not do. About the graphic.