Distinguished Speaker SeriesAll talks are free and open to the public. A selected bibliography and brief speaker biographies are available in the Resource section of this web site. Friday, January 13The quest for the genes that make us humanSvante Pääbo, Max-Planck Institute of Evolutionary One approach to understanding what makes humans unique as a species is to perform structural and functional comparisons between the genomes of humans and our closest evolutionary relatives, the great apes. Recently, the draft sequence of the chimpanzee genome has opened up new possibilities in this area. I will describe work that compares the DNA sequences and activities of human and chimpanzee genes and discuss evidence that suggests that genes expressed in the brain may have been particularly important during human evolution. Wednesday, January 25Intelligent Design and the Creationism/Evolution ControversyEugenie Scott, National Center for Science Education Eugenie Scott's January 25 talk was video-taped and each segment is Windows users should have no trouble opening the file. Mac users need
to "Intelligent Design" (ID) is a new form of creationism that emerged after legal decisions in the 1980s hampered the inclusion of "creation science" in the public school curriculum. ID consists of a scientific/scholarly effort, and a politico-religious movement of "cultural renewal." In the 20 years since ID appeared, there has been no evidence of it being used to solve problems in biology. Although the scientific/scholarly part of ID has been a failure, the "cultural renewal" part of ID has been a success, as supporters of ID seek "restoration" of a theistic sensibility in American culture to replace what they consider an overemphasis on secularism. Wednesday, February 1Forty years of thinking about the origins of the human lineageDavid Pilbeam. Harvard University Ideas about when and where the first hominids evolved, why they evolved, and what they and their immediate ape ancestors looked like, changed considerably over the past half-century. In discussing these shifts I will also reflect on what it has been like to participate in this rapidly changing field. Wednesday, February 8Primate and human societyRichard Wrangham, Harvard University Human society is in some ways ape-like and in other ways unique. Our ape-like features appear explicable by the same rules that govern primate societies. Our unique traits, such as the sexual division of labor, depend on human specializations such as the adoption of cooking. Wednesday, March 8The Tree of Life: Is it really a web?W. Ford Doolittle, Dalhousie University Darwin claimed that the history of Life can be "represented by a great tree". Many types of evidence, and especially gene sequence data, support this claim as far as complex life forms such as animals and plants are concerned. But for bacteria and archaebacteria, frequent transfer of genes across species lines complicates the picture: the pattern of relationships may be more web-like than tree-like. I will describe the evidence for this, and discuss whether or not it is appropriate to say that, in this context, Darwin was wrong. Wednesday, March 22Ageing and evolutionary medicineLinda Partridge, University College London Wednesday, April 5Exploring evolution of Darwin's FinchesPeter and Rosemary Grant, Princeton University Fourteen species of Darwin's finches evolved on the Galápagos islands and Cocos island in the last two-three million years. We use the results of long-term field studies of Galápagos populations to help us understand this classical example of adaptive radiation. Co-sponsored by the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads Program and the Ann Arbor District Library Wednesday, April 19Gene, organism and environmentRichard Lewontin, Harvard University Biologists often speak of genes as “determining” organisms and of the evolution of organisms as “adaptation” of organisms to a fixed external environment. The talk will show how these oversimplifications mask the true relationship among genes, organisms and environments.
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