Category: Evolution
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Science moves closer to Adam and Eve?
Yesterday, the journal Science published a study providing evidence that humans are descended from very small population. The authors detect a bottleneck lasting about 100,000 years with an average effective population size of about 1280. They date this to about 813,000 to 930,000 years ago, placing it before the divergence of Neandertals and Denisovans from […]
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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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Video: Adam, Eve and human genetic diversity
This video summarises my understanding of the current genetic evidence on whether or not humans could have passed through a bottleneck of a single couple at some point in our history. It is a talk I gave in May 2020 for a group of scientists from across Europe who identify as Christians. This audience came […]
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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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Why phylogenetics is difficult
Here is a short video I made for one of my MSc classes, explaining why building phylogenetic trees is not easy. For examples of this phenomenon in my own research see here and here.
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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 […]
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Did Darwin make atheism credible?
Imagine that my wife and I walk into our living room one morning to find that our son’s toy box has fallen over, and pieces of BRIO train set track lie jumbled on the floor. But eight of the pieces are joined together in a perfect circle, lying on the floor, with a train on […]