biology

#799 Pasquale Raia: The Impact of Climate Change on Evolution, and the Extinction of Species

Jun 23, 2023

Dr. Pasquale Raia is Professor of Paleontology and Paleoecology at the University of Naples Federico II. His scientific interests concern the evolution and the dynamics of extinction of animal species, and in particular the fossils of hominid species. His most notable scientific contributions regard evolutionary theories about the evolution of insular species, the complexity of organisms, and the dynamics of extinction of hominids. More»
#782 Gillian Forrester: The Evolution of Handedness, Cerebral Lateralization, and Language

May 15, 2023

Dr. Gillian Forrester is a Professor of Comparative Cognition in the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex. She is the director of the Comparative Cognition Group investigating the behaviors and brain organization of children, gorillas and chimpanzees focusing on how cognitive abilities evolve and develop over time and across species. More»
#778 Carles Lalueza-Fox - Inequality: A Genetic History

May 5, 2023

Dr. Carles Lalueza-Fox is Director of the Natural Science Museum in Barcelona. He participated in the Neanderthal Genome Project and led the first retrieval of the genome of an 8,000-year-old European hunter-gatherer. He is the author of Inequality: A Genetic History. More»
#756 Donald Hoffman: The Case Against Reality, and the Interface Theory of Perception

Mar 16, 2023

Dr. Donald Hoffman is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Hoffman studies consciousness, visual perception and evolutionary psychology using mathematical models and psychophysical experiments. He is the author of The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. More»
#753 R. Paul Thompson: Evolution, Morality and the Fabric of Society

Mar 9, 2023

Dr. R. Paul Thompson holds appointments as Professor in the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. He has published extensively on evolutionary theory, population genetics, mathematical modelling in biology, theory structure in biology, philosophy of medicine, and ethics. He is the author of Evolution, Morality and the Fabric of Society. More»
#750 Adam Rutherford - Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics

Mar 2, 2023

Dr. Adam Rutherford is Lecturer in Biology and Society at University College London’s Department of Genes, Evolution, and Environment, and President of Humanists UK. His interests are in evolution, genetics and developmental biology, and the history of biology. He has written extensively on Darwin, the development of evolutionary theory, the Modern Synthesis, early microscopy, synthetic biology and genetic engineering, behavioral ecology, gene-culture co-evolution, human evolution, and ancient DNA. He is the author of several books, including Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics. More»
#735 Daniel Blumstein: Predator-Prey Research, Antipredator Behavior, and Conservationism

Jan 26, 2023

Dr. Daniel Blumstein is a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Professor at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. He is a behavioral ecologist broadly interested in the evolution of behavior and the application of behavioral and evolutionary principles to policy, health, and defense. He has studied the behavior and ecology of mammals (including humans), birds, fish, lizards, hermit crabs, and sea anemone, and runs the 50+ year project studying the behavioral and evolutionary ecology of yellow-bellied marmots at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado. He is the author of books like A Primer of Conservation Behavior, The Failure of Environmental Education (And How We Can Fix It), and The Nature of Fear: Survival Lessons from the Wild. More»
#733 Andrew Knoll - A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters

Jan 20, 2023

Dr. Andrew Knoll is the Fisher Professor of Natural History at Harvard University. Dr. Knoll’s research focuses on the early evolution of life, Earth’s environmental history, and, especially, the interconnections between the two. For the past decade, he has served on the science team for NASA’s MER mission to Mars. Professor Knoll’s honors include the Walcott Medal and the Mary Clark Thompson Medal of the National Academy of Sciences, the Phi Beta Kappa Book Award in Science (for his 2003 book Life on a Young Planet), the Moore Medal of the Society for Sedimentary Geology, the Paleontological Society Medal, and the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London. Dr. Knoll is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Microbiology. He is the author of A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters. More»
#713 Lucy Cooke - Bitch: On the Female of the Species

Dec 5, 2022

Lucy Cooke is a New York Times best-selling author, award-winning documentary filmmaker and broadcaster, National Geographic explorer and TED talker with a Masters in Zoology from the University of Oxford. Her latest book is Bitch: On the Female of the Species. More»
#709 Jeanne Bovet: The Evolution of Female Attractiveness, and Parent-Offspring Conflict in Mating

Nov 25, 2022

Dr. Jeanne Bovet is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychology at Northumbria University. Broadly, she tries to understand how evolution shaped our preferences, and what its consequences are in our contemporary lives. Her work has covered various topics such as parent-offspring conflict over mate choice, variation in feminine beauty standards through history, sexual selection on age at menopause, and mate preferences for homogamy in facial features. More»