What better way to celebrate Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, than with a symposium which highlights the vast diversity, brilliance, and accomplishments of today’s evolutionary biologists. This week, MIT hosted a three day symposium to celebrate the life and work of Charles Darwin, whose On the Origin of Species will turn 150 years old this year.
Talk topics ranged from evolution on a molecular scale to paleontology, highlighting the breadth and implications of the evolutionary theory. I had the pleasure of sitting in on just a couple of the talks during the symposium, the first given by Pardis Sabeti on “Natural Selection in Humans and Pathogens.” Sabeti and her lab members designed software to crawl the human genome looking for “genomic signals of natural selection.” In general terms, the software looks for genes that are highly prevalent in the population but haven’t been there very long (relatively speaking), suggesting that they were selected for by evolutionary pressure. Using this approach, Sabeti identified a number of genes subjected to selective pressure, including a gene called LARGE, which can act as a mediator of Lassa virus entry into cells. Sabeti went on to set up a brand new lab in Nigeria, to track Lassa virus infection rates to identify genetic determinants of susceptibility to the virus. She is young, she is excited about her work, and she is making a large impact not only on evolutionary biology, but on world health.
The following talk looked at evolution at a traditional, organismal level. Farish Jenkins has been mentioned around NN a number of times before. Not surprising, since his recent finding of Tiktaalik_, a missing link between shallow water fish and amphibious tetrapods shook the science (or "_Nature":https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v440/n7085/abs/nature04639.html) world two years ago. Jenkins, in a highly animated, hugely entertaining and almost theatrical manner, described his many expeditions to the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, in the course of which he and his team discovered a fossil of a fish with a neck, elevated eyes on the same side of its head and wrists which could support the weight of its body. In other words, they found the missing link between animals who swam in the water and those that crawled out onto land to later (much later) become… human.
Please pardon the fuzzy picture of Farish Jenkins. He rarely stood still for long – one of the many reasons his talk was so captivating.
They were both thrilling talks. Yes, they were scientific seminars, but I walked away thrilled. Thrilled about how cool and engaging science can be, thrilled by the impact of the evolutionary theory and thrilled by the theory’s many interpretations.
Happy Birthday, Mr. Darwin! Thank you for the Origin of Species and for inspiring a great symposium, which in turn inspired me. I guess that was the whole point, huh?