biology

#577 Russell Gray: Language Evolution, Big Gods and Rituals, and Animal Cognition

Jan 21, 2022

Dr. Russell Gray is the director to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. He also holds an adjunct position in the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland. Dr. Gray’s research spans the areas of cultural evolution, linguistics, animal cognition, and the philosophy of biology. He helped pioneer the application of computational evolutionary methods to questions about linguistic prehistory and cultural evolution. His work has shed new insights on the 200 year-old debate on the origin of Indo-European languages. More»
#572 Günter Wagner: Gene Regulation, Evolutionary Novelties, and the Evolution of Pregnancy

Jan 10, 2022

Dr. Günter Wagner is Alison Richard Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Adjunct Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at Yale University, and Adjunct Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Wayne State University. He is an evolutionary geneticist with training in biochemical engineering, zoology and mathematics from the University of Vienna, Austria. Dr. Wagner's research interest is the evolution of gene regulation as it pertains to the origin of evolutionary novelties. In particular the lab is focusing on the evolution of the endometrial stromal cells in the context of the evolutionary origin of pregnancy. Another focus of his lab is the developmental basis of character identity, as for instance in the case of digit identity of birds. More»
#563 Robert Brooks Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers, and Algorithmic Matchmakers

Dec 20, 2021

Dr. Robert Brooks is Professor of Evolution at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He studies the evolution of mate choice, the costs of being attractive, sexual conflict, the reason animals age and the links between sex, diet, obesity and death. He is the author of Sex, Genes & Rock ‘n’ Roll: How Evolution has Shaped the Modern World, and, more recently, Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers, and Algorithmic Matchmakers. More»
#552 Kate Adamala: Synthetic Cells, Cell Evolution, the Origin of Life, and Astrobiology

Nov 25, 2021

Dr. Katarzyna (Kate) P. Adamala is a synthetic biologist and a professor of genetics at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Adamala's work includes contributions to the field of astrobiology, synthetic cell engineering, and biocomputing. Her research on prebiotic RNA replication provided an experimental scenario for the RNA world hypothesis of the origin of life. She has worked on constructing liposome bioreactor synthetic cells. She is a founder and steering group member of the Build-a-Cell Initiative, an international collaboration for creation of synthetic live cells. She is a co-founder of synthetic cell company Synlife. Adamala and Szostak demonstrated non enzymatic RNA replication in primitive protocells is only possibly in presence of weak cation chelator like citric acid, providing further evidence for the central role of citric acid in primordial metabolism. More»
#549 Arvid Ågren: The Gene's-Eye View of Evolution

Nov 18, 2021

Dr. Arvid Ågren is Wenner-Gren Fellow in the Department of Evolutionary Biology at Uppsala University. He is an evolutionary biologist studying genomic conflicts. He is the author of The Gene's-Eye View of Evolution. More»
#540 Itai Yanai: The Society of Genes; Genome Evolution, Epigenetics, Health, and Gene Editing

Oct 28, 2021

Dr. Itai Yanai is Founding Director of the Institute for Computational Medicine at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He is also a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at NYU. He does research on cancer, computational biology, developmental genetics, genomics, microbiome, systems biology, single-cell transcriptomics, gene expression atlas construction, genome evolution. He is the author of The Society of Genes. More»
#537 Christopher Kuzawa: Developmental Plasticity, Life History, and Epigenetics

Oct 21, 2021

Dr. Christopher Kuzawa is Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. He uses principles from anthropology and evolutionary biology to gain insights into the biological and health impacts of human developmental plasticity. His primary field research is conducted in Cebu, the Philippines, where he works with a large birth cohort study that enrolled more than 3,000 pregnant women in 1983 and has since followed their offspring into adulthood (now 30 years old). He uses the nearly 3 decades of data available for each study participant, and recruitment of generation 3 (the grandoffspring of the original mothers), to gain a better understanding of the long-term and intergenerational impacts of early life environments on adult biology, life history, reproduction, and health. A theme of much of his work is the application of principles of developmental plasticity and evolutionary biology to issues of health. More»
#532 Robert Paarlberg - Resetting the Table: Straight Talk About the Food We Grow and Eat

Oct 8, 2021

Dr. Robert Paarlberg is Betty Freyhof Johnson ’44 Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Wellesley College, and an Associate in the Sustainability Science Program at Harvard University. His research focuses on the international agricultural and environmental policy, regulation of modern technology, including biotechnology. He is the author of many books, including C More»
#530 Jeremy DeSilva - A Most Interesting Problem; Darwin’s Descent of Man (150th anniversary)

Oct 4, 2021

Dr. Jeremy DeSilva is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. He is a paleoanthropologist, specializing in the locomotion of the first apes (hominoids) and early human ancestors (hominins). His particular anatomical expertise-- the human foot and ankle-- has contributed to our understanding of the origins and evolution of upright walking in the human lineage. He has studied wild chimpanzees in Western Uganda and early human fossils in Museums throughout Eastern and South Africa. From 1998-2003, Dr. DeSilva worked as an educator at the Boston Museum of Science and continues to be passionate about science education. He is the author of A Most Interesting Problem: What Darwin’s Descent of Man Got Right and Wrong about Human Evolution. More»
#518 Andrew Berry: The History of Evolutionary Biology (Pt. 2) - Genetics, and Speciation

Sep 6, 2021

Dr. Andrew Berry is a lecturer in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. He is an evolutionary biologist with a particular interest in Alfred Russel Wallace. His research combined field and laboratory methods to detect positive Darwinian selection (i.e. adaptive evolution) at the molecular level in natural populations. He has published two books: Infinite tropics: an Alfred Russel Wallace Anthology, with a foreword written by Stephen Jay Gould, and DNA: The Secret of Life with James Watson. More»