Why it is fine to be thoroughly confused... initially: rethinking the process of adaptive evolution

We are delighted to announce that the next EGI seminar will be given by Dr Pim Edelaar from Pablo de Olavide University, Spain at 15:30 on Friday 30th October. 

Why it is fine to be thoroughly confused... initially: rethinking the process of adaptive evolution
I will start my talk with the results of an experiment performed in the wild with Tree sparrows. I think these results are easy to understand, and perhaps even obvious. We replicated it indoors with Zebra finches. And outdoors with grasshoppers. And again, indoors with fruit flies. But then I will argue that these results are actually hard to understand. I will argue that to understand what is happening, we could benefit from going back to the basics – Lewontin’s three requirements for adaptive evolution. I will show why and how we should expand our understanding of each of these requirements. And thereby actually also how we can expand our theoretical framework of the dynamics of the evolutionary process, as recently published in my book (The Selective Organism, OUP, also available under Open Access). Finally, I will argue that that expanded framework can also help us to understand a range of seemingly unrelated biological phenomena, such as cultural evolution and epigenetic inheritance.