Beak and skull shapes in birds of prey (“raptors”) are strongly coupled and largely controlled by size.

gif provided by the awesome Jen Bright @MorphobeakGeek!

In this exercise we will use a github repo to collaboratively collate and simulate evolutionary trajectories for each participants' species body size using a simple brownian motion evolutionary model. This assumes evolutionary steps to progress comletely at random. You could say, it's a bit of lottery!

• Each participant will create and contribute a file specifying the parameters required to simulate and plot their species evolutionary trajectory.
• We'll collect all participants' files in the master repo.
• Once all trajectories are simulated they'll be plotted together.
• Participants will then get to see the skull and beak shape corresponding to their species relative body size!

We'll be accepting pull requests by remote participants between 11.30 - 12.00, so anyone can get involved! Follow #EvoLottery on the day for live updates on twitter.

link to full session handout

• fork the repo into your own account
• copy repo url link local files to github repo

• create new project
• checkout from version control/git
• paste github repo link

A template is provided in the repo, in folder /params named params_tmpl.R. Open the params_tmpl.R and save as to create a duplicate template. Name the template using the name of your species.

The parameters each participants need to supply are:

• sig2: A numeric value greater than 0 but smaller than 5

• species.name: a character string e.g. "anas_krystallinus". Try to create a species name out of your name!

• color: e.g. "red", "#FFFFFF" (tip: pick a color using Rstudio's Color picker:)

• Use the git tab, tick the box next to your new script ONLY and commit.

• Supply a descriptive message of the commit.

• push your changes to github

• create a pull request to merge your changes to the master repo

• most likely it'll be a thumbs up! But I might also request a correction if I spot an error.

• Mozfest Github ❤️ Rstudio session
• ISBE Reproducibility Symposium: evolutionary lottery
• UNAM OpenScience workshop series: evolutionary lottery