Month: September 2017

First, let me make it clear that, as far as I know, the sentence “It’s the economy, stupid!” was never used, orally or in writing, by the (Bill) Clinton campaigns. It may be a nice summary, but it was never used as such. But let us go back to our topic.

One day, I was teaching teachers who teach biology teachers how to teach biology (yes, it is a true sentence). And I asked the teachers’ teachers to spell out the mechanism of evolution by natural selection. Everybody told me: there is variation; variation is heritable; then the best individuals survive/produce more offspring and evolution happens.

That’s right. Selection is perceived as a sort of mechanism testing ‘adequacy’ (we call it ‘adaptation’) of individuals to their environment. Somehow, we’re still pretty much innately Lamarckian*, after all: we think in terms of how an individual copes with its everyday problems. While this is certainly an important component of ‘adaptation’ in general terms, and while for sure it is individuals (and not genes, or populations, or – heavens forbid – species) who survive or die, reproduce or not, the description falls short of describing the actual mechanism of evolution, because it misses an essential component.

Thinking in terms of individual properties and problems is not the exactly right way of looking at selection and adaptation. As the Australian saying goes, “when there is a shark in the water, you do not need to swim faster than the shark: you need to swim faster than the slowest swimmer” (I’ll let you generalise to the case where there are n sharks in the water, I know you can manage; and I’m sure you know a regional version of the saying, with other threats than sharks). The point is that selection is not about individual relationships to the environment, but about whether you do better or worse than somebody else.

And this brings to the fore the essential cog of selection’s machinery that many people (including biologists – except for evolutionary biologists themselves) miss: demography. It is because there are always many more siblings than the environment can carry that eventually some of them die / do not reproduce.

The “fitness” part of the game is, of course, that those who exploit the available resources better / better cope with stress perform better from the survival / reproduction point of view, and leave more offspring (the way the parents’ traits are inherited does not change a thing). If there were infinite space and resources, nobody would suffer from selection, and everything would behave according to neutral evolution. Darwin borrowed the idea from Malthus, as everybody knows, and this is the piece that makes the difference between any evolutionary hypothesis and the Modern Synthesis’ successful one** (in terms of explanatory power). It is because some individuals die / do not reproduce that there is adaptation. Somehow, we should be happy to observe (moderate amounts of) mortality (in forests there’s a lot of it) and unequal fecundity in populations, because this is how adaptation occurs.

The Malthusian piece of Darwin’s genius idea is understandably hard to swallow. As one of the teachers’ teachers exclaimed, after I had pointed out the strict necessity of the cruel Malthusian piece in the Theory: “oh, that’s so SAD”. Yes, life is unfair, but adaptive biological evolution happens only if there are winners and losers. Now, if I were in the losers’ camp, I’d rather prefer no evolution-by-selection to happen at all, but this is the way it is – no social or anthropocentric judgement to be attached.

 

 

*Lamarck, in spite of his post-Darwin very bad press covfefe, was a true evolutionary biologist, and a clever one at that. He lacked some important pieces of understanding of how selection works, but then again, Darwin too had silly views about heritability of traits.

** I refrain from attributing the idea entirely to dear uncle Charles for two reasons. First, he lacked the mathematical formalism to model the mechanism; second, I disagree with the identification of Evolutionary theory with one person, no matter how grateful we should all be to the genius that was Charles Darwin. After all, nobody talks in terms of “Einsteinism” or “Röntgenism”, so why should we talk about “Darwinism”?

The latest post on Massimo Pigliucci’s blog Platofootnote is here.
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I’m back from a couple of conferences: the ESEB meeting in Groningen and the SIBE meeting in Rome.

Both were terrific, and both allowed me to come back home with the usual mix of excitement (for the impressive amount of good science that people do, and for the truckload of good ideas I could grab) and frustration (for not having done myself all that good science!).

Among other things, I must stress the feeling of being (at 47) among the eldest at both conferences – and this is a very positive remark: of course, one gets older and thus climbs the pyramid of ages, but I reckon that evolutionary biology conference-goers are, on average, pretty young and impressively competent. This spells good for the future of evolutionary biology!

Yet, I’ve been wondering throughout both conferences where all my fellow forest evolutionary biologists were hiding. Certainly, those two conferences do not focus on forests, but they do not focus on fruit flies and mice either, and I’ve been hearing plenty of talks on those critters. For sure, forest trees are not “model” species, but the share taken by model species at both conferences was, globally, very small, so there must not have been a “filter” against papers on trees. The fact is, there were very few forests across the conference landscape. Somehow, I felt slightly lonely with my forest population genetics talks and posters.

Yet – although I’ll provide no list, for fear of omitting somebody – I know plenty of forest scientists having provided major contributions to asking and answering overarching (*) evolutionary questions and to developing evolutionary theory: evolutionary biology is a relevant playground for forest geneticists. So why was I so lonely? Why the attendance of forest geneticists, young and old, to general conferences is decreasing? Are they all busy tending to their science, with nothing worth sharing in their hand? Or is their budget, both in terms of time and money, decreasing so abruptly that they cannot afford those meetings any more? Or maybe they are folding back on their community?

To check, I had a look at the program of the IUFRO general meeting, that will be held in Freiburg next week – IUFRO is the United Nations of forestry research, every forest scientist goes to a IUFRO meeting every so often. And even there, although I have carefully scrolled all symposia and checked speaker lists, I could barely find the names of acclaimed and less known forest geneticists. Essentially, our research field will not be represented there, either (well, I confess: I am not attending, but I could not go to three conferences in less than a month).

Forest geneticists are deserting both general evolution / evolutionary genetics events and forest-focused meetings. Why? And – apart from forest genetics conferences – where do they go? I’d very much like to know the answers to those questions. Plus, I would like to say that it is very important, for junior and senior scientists alike, to get out of our “comfort zone”, and mix with people doing (relatively speaking) entirely different things. As I said above, one comes home with his suitcase full of great ideas.

(*) It is good to fit the word overarching into a text, from time to time. It makes you feel important.