Category: Darwin
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Public lecture “Trees of Life: Do they exist?”
In gave my inaugural lecture as Professor of Evolutionary Genomics at Queen Mary University of London on 16th November 2022, the film of which can be viewed below. Inaugural lectures are a chance to give a personal view on one’s research field, at a level that will be understood by the whole university and the […]
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Natural v. Artificial Selection
Last week I published a short article in Molecular Ecology on evidence for natural selection. It has proven difficult to show natural selection occurring in real time in wild populations. New approaches may help, and these are being pioneered in studies of Soay sheep. While commenting on these new approaches, I make several general points […]
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The Garden: Why are flowers a biological mystery?
Last week I gave an online talk for The Garden, a new a platform that connects people who love to learn with academics and experts for live talks. I spoke on Darwin’s abominable mystery, covering 150 years of research on the origin of the flowering plants. This drew on articles I have published in American […]
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A new talk on Darwin’s abominable mystery
Last evening I spoke for the Reading Geological Society on Darwin’s “abominable mystery”: the origin of flowering plants. My previous talks and publications (here and here) on this topic have focused mainly on the nineteenth century. In this new talk, I outlined twentieth century efforts to solve the mystery, which is something I continue to […]
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Video: More than evolution
Here is a 20 minute lockdown video I published on YouTube a few days ago. In it, I make one major point: it is as hard to be an atheist today as it was 2400 years ago. In fact, a little harder. I have seen a few responses to this video by atheists since I […]
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What was Darwin thinking? The origin of his ‘abominable mystery’
Happy Darwin Day 2021! This blog is about Darwin’s thought in the final years of his life, written for the Nature Ecology and Evolution community and re-published here. Back in 2012, The Natural History Museum of Milan invited me to give a talk for their Darwin Day symposium. Predictably for a botanist, I took the […]