Evolutionary Path Dependency

A few colleagues and I have started to delve into Richard Dawkins The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.  Apparently, our leisure reading involves reading science based books.  For those of you who are still reading the book, this blog post goes into detail about Chapter 11 and this introduction will serve as my official spoiler alert (in case you do not want your science spoiled); for others, we can venture on.  

“A leopard don’t change its stripes… You mean spots… I means Snaps!”

If you are looking for a good political science movie to show an undergraduate class, I highly recommend the movie Oscar (1991). I really like this movie because it can be used to teach a variety of concepts, such as path dependency, institutional change, beliefs and how they affect behavior, and bargaining. It is also incredibly well done and extremely funny; from my experience undergraduates really enjoy it. Following the jump, I give a brief synopsis of the movie and explain how certain parts of the movie can be used to demonstrate certain concepts in political science. So if you Continue reading “A leopard don’t change its stripes… You mean spots… I means Snaps!”