Darwin/Chicago 2009: Saturday

12:15 p.m. - The Late-Blooming Study of Animal Behavior

Finally, more than three-quarters of the way through the conference, we get our first positive mention of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the Pete Best of evolution. I expected Pietro Corsi, author of the definitive Lamarck website, to give us some Lamarck love yesterday, but he said he wanted to focus on other, more neglected scientists of the 19th century: “I’m sick and tired of Lamarck,” Corsi said. “Either it’s ...

Darwin or Lamarck, and we keep missing the point.”

But Richard Burkhardt, from the University of Illinois, was happy to pay Lamarck his due as the first scientist to emphasize the importance of animal behavior in biology. Lamarck’s theory supporting the inheritance of acquired characteristics gave behavior its due as both a cause and result of evolution - encapsulated most famously in his example of a giraffe stretching its neck to reach food on tall trees and passing down that elongated neck to its offspring. Amazingly, Burkhardt points out that Lamarck never saw a live giraffe and based his theories entirely on the viewing of dead specimens, making him an unlikely father of the science of animal behavior, but an important ancestor nonetheless for linking behavior to evolution.

Darwin himself conducted animal behavioral experiments at home, and famously used the behavior of social insects such as bees - where worker drones are unable to reproduce - as examples of how natural selection can work on the population level as well as the individual. But the field of studying animal behavior still lagged in part to (we mention again) the difficulty of field studies, which are “notoriously better for the animal than for the observer,” Burkhardt said. One early proponent of animal behavior worked right up the street from today’s conference - Charles Otis Whitman, who built an aviary for studying hundreds of pigeons at his home near the University of Chicago campus in the early 20th century.

But it wasn’t until the 1960’s and 70’s when the field of behavioral ecology truly took flight, Burkhardt said, and in four decades of work it has only scratched the surface of describing how natural selection whittled complex behaviors as animals adapt to their environment. “The field continues to shed light on both the products of evolution and the mechanisms under which it operates,” Burkhardt said. 

11:00 a.m. - Redrawing the Boundaries of Evolution

Part of the purpose of a conference is to open up a field of study to outside input, resisting the natural flow of a scientific discipline to become an isolated and insular island. The morning session for the Biological Sciences branch focused on stretching the boundaries of evolutionary biology to incorporate related, but sometimes alienated fields - one new and one old.

Perhaps because the University of Chicago has a Department of Ecology & Evolution, I didn’t realize that the pairing of those two fields was a recent phenomenon. On the surface, it seems more than logical - both are sciences of natural life - but the day’s opening talk by Thomas Schoener from UC-Davis mostly portrayed a courtship between the two disciplines that only goes back about 10 years. The issue, it seems, is that it’s much easier to think about evolution of a species in isolation, with natural selection shaping its features and behavior over time. But no species on Earth is truly isolated, and every significant change in a species should have a ripple effect through all the other species in connects to, either in a food web or a more indirect ecological relationship.

Yet studying the relationship between ecology and evolution is no simple matter; as Schoener put it, there are plenty examples of ecology affecting evolution (think the peppered moths of England, which grew darker as soot blackened their environment), but few examples of evolution affecting ecology. To demonstrate such an effect, one would need to find a case of rapid evolution, on the scale of years instead of millions of years, and study it carefully in the field. Setting up such studies is so difficult that there really haven’t been any satisfying cases as of yet, but Schoener described his ongoing experiments in the Bahamas (must be nice) where researchers are introducing a small lizard on to an island and studying both how it evolves and how that evolution affects other animals and plants in that environment.

The other argument for a bridge between evolution and another discipline was made by University of Chicago’s David Jablonski, who made the case for a “renewed partnership” between paleontology and evolutionary biology. As Paul Sereno noted yesterday, Darwin largely avoided the fossil record in his writings, because the record of his time was very spotty and entirely unpredictable - many a scientific theory has been sunk by the discovery of a previously unexpected fossil. But in the 150 years since Origin of Species was published, Jablonski argued, the fossil record has filled in enough to become a valuable tool for the study of evolution over long stretches of time.

As Schoener noted, scientists studying living creatures are constrained to only study cases of rapid evolution by the fact that we only live 7 or 8 decades - a mere fraction of a blink in evolutionary time. But Jablonski, who studies bivalve fossils, said that the answers to important questions about the rates of extinction and diversification in different species can be answered with careful study of the fossil record, which offers a “trail of mayhem, destruction and heartbreak.” 

9:15 a.m. - Day Two Begins

And we’re back for the second full day of Darwin discussion on a gorgeously crisp fall day at the University of Chicago. The speakers and attendees are loading up on coffee and pastries before the program starts at 9:30. I’ll be checking in all day with frequent updates from talks by Thomas Schoener, David Jablonski, Richard Burkhardt, Neil Shubin, and more. Continue to check PZ Myers of Pharyngula and Skip Evans of Wisconsin Citizens for Science for their reports from the conference as well.

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