The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Peter R. Grant, Ph.D., professor emeritus, department of ecology and evolutionary biology, Princeton University

B. Rosemary Grant, Ph.D., professor emerita, department of ecology and evolutionary biology, Princeton University

Speaker bio(s)

In the Origin of Species Charles Darwin established the scientific basis for understanding how evolution occurs by natural selection. To explain how species form he envisioned a three-step process: colonization, involving the expansion of a population into a new environment; divergence, when populations become adapted to novel environmental conditions through natural selection; and finally, the formation of a barrier to interbreeding between divergent lineages. He showed characteristic insight by suggesting that investigations of what we now call, “very young adaptive radiations” might provide windows through which we can view the processes involved. Since Darwin’s time insights from the fields of genetics, behavior and ecology have continued to illuminate how and why species evolve. In this talk Drs. Peter Grant and Rosemary Grant will discuss the progress that has been made in our understanding of speciation with special reference to the young radiation of Darwin’s finches. They will draw upon the results of a long-term field study of finch populations spanning several decades, combined with laboratory investigations of the molecular genetic basis of beak development.

Peter and Rosemary Grant have been studying Darwin’s finches on the Galápagos islands since 1973 in order to understand the causes of an adaptive radiation. Rosemary was initially trained at the University of Edinburgh, received a Ph.D. degree from Uppsala University, and was a research scholar and lecturer with the rank of professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University until she retired from teaching in 2008. Peter is the Class of 1877 Professor Emeritus in the same department, having trained at Cambridge University and the University of British Columbia. Before joining Princeton in 1986, he taught at McGill University and the University of Michigan.

Open to

Public

Reception

Refreshments, 3:15 p.m. - 3:45 p.m., Abby Lounge

Contact

Gloria Phipps

Phone

(212) 327-8967

Sponsor

Gloria Phipps
(212) 327-8967
phippsg@rockefeller.edu