Seminars

‘From Wrangel to Flores: size evolution on islands’ By Shai Meiri (Natural Sciences, Imperial College London) Abstract: Islands are often portrayed as weird and wonderful places where, free from pressures of factors such as competition and predation, animals can quickly evolve some truly fantastic forms. A key trait that is often said to evolve quickly and […]

‘Darwin’s Compass: Why evolution is very far from random’ By Simon Conway Morris (Cambridge Earth Sciences) Abstract: Received wisdom is that evolution is effectively open-ended and inherently unpredictable. Jared Diamond points to the uniqueness of woodpeckers and extrapolates to the human, while on a yet wider stage Steven J. Gould famously claimed that to re-run

Joint LERN/CEE Seminar ‘Comparative genomics: structure and evolution of HOX clusters’ By Sonja Prohaska (Arizona State University & University of Leipzig) Abstract: The Hox gene clusters underly phenomena of maintenance and rearrangement of their genomic structure suggesting yet unexplored selective constraints and changes thereof during the course of evolution. Non-coding sequence evolution within Hox clusters shapes gene expression