Darwin Day talk by Jeff Mitton: Recent Developments in Natural Selection
Details
Join us to celebrate Darwin Day and the Hub's 4th birthday celebration! We will have a series of short talk/discussions starting at 6:30pm and then our keynote address will begin at 7:30pm by Professor Jeff Mitton. Stay for cake and meet Jeff after!
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Title: Recent Developments in Natural Selection Would Please Darwin
Abstract: Darwin made many contributions, but none had more impact on science and society than his simple, extensively documented, and thoroughly convincing description of natural selection. In recent decades, we have come to appreciate that selection in natural populations is much stronger, and hence evolution occurs more quickly than Darwin appreciated. To demonstrate the ubiquity and strength of nature selection, a series of local examples of selection will be presented. Local examples will include the response of mountain pine beetles to warming spring temperatutes, the interaction of pines and mountain pine beetles, coloration in jagged ambush bugs, and adaptation of both limber pine and ponderosa pine to elevational gradients in the Front Range of Colorado.
Mitton Lab at CU: http://spot.colorado.edu/~mitton/
Jeff's Flickr Page: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeff_mitton/
Jeff Mitton received a Ph D in Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University in 1973 and joined the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado in Boulder in 1974. He regularly teaches a large introductory course in Genetics and an advanced genetics course that has students extracting DNA, using PCR to amplify specific genes, and sequencing DNA. His research focuses on the genetics of natural populations of both plants and animals, including bighorn sheep, mountain pine beetles, Engelmann spruce, quaking aspen and limber pine. The common thread among these seemingly diverse studies is his interest in genes that adapt populations to the environmental heterogeneity that they must endure. He writes a biweekly science column entitled "Natural Selections" for the Boulder Daily Camera and illustrates each column with one of his photos.