Yearly on the 12th of February, Charles Darwin’s birthday, the scientific group recognises Darwin Day. This can be a celebration of evolutionary biology and all that we’ve learnt since Darwin launched us to the idea of pure choice. To mark the occasion, the Institute holds an annual Darwin Lecture. This can be a extremely prestigious night within the IBAHCM’s calendar, the place a researcher on the forefront of their subject is invited to current their work and share their insights on this foundational idea in biology.
This 12 months we had been honoured to host Prof. Sonia Sultan from Wesleyan College (Connecticut, USA). Prof. Sultan has gained a wealth of analysis expertise over the course of greater than twenty years: she actually wrote the textbook on how organisms work together with their environments. Right here, Prof. Sultan talks to us about her analysis on phenotypic plasticity and transgenerational impact in crops, and shares her ideas on one in all most controversial concepts at the moment circulating in mainstream evolutionary biology: the so-called ‘prolonged evolutionary synthesis’.
The characteristic picture for this publish exhibits two phenotypically completely different, but genetically similar, people of Polygonum cespitosum. It was taken from: Sultan, S.E. and Matesanz, S. (2017) A really perfect weed: plasticity and invasiveness in Polygonum cespitosum. Ann N Y Acad Sci. 1360:101-19.
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Intro and outro music sampled from: “The Curtain Rises” and “Early Riser” Kevin MacLeod [CC BY 3.0]
