Sunday, March 14, 2010

Lab-meeting: "The biology of speciation"

This coming week, I was thinking that we should discuss a thought-provoking article entitled "The biology of speciation", published in Evolution early this year (2010). One of the authors is well-known plant evolutionary biologist Douglas Schemske, a strong naturalist and deep thinker. This article takes a critical look at the concept of "ecological speciation", and questions the usefulness of this term, since ecology is more or less involved in most speciation events. Instead, the authors argues that Ernst Mayr's term "Biological speciation" is more useful. I hope you will enjoy this paper and that we will have some thoughtful discussions about it. Ecological speciation has been taken so much for granted the last decade, so it is certainly time to critically question its importance and ask if its role has been exaggerated.

Time and place as usual: "Darwin", 2nd floor, Ecology Building on Wednesday March 17 (10.15).

Any "fika" volunteer???

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