Happy New EXEB year 2015!

Posted by Erik Svensson

On behalf of myself and all EXEB members, I wish us all a Happy New 2015, and I hope it will be a succesful as 2014 was. Here, I briefly summarize my own subjective impressions of the past year and speculate a little bit about the future.

2014 was very dynamic and a lot of positive things happened. Maren Wellenreuther and Machteld Verzijden got new jobs and moved to Denmark and New Zeeland, respectively. Tobias Uller started his position in Lund on 50 %, while finishing his position in Oxford. Viktor Nilsson-Örtman and Katie Duryea both got postdoctoral scholarships, from The Swedish Research Council (VR) and The National Science Foundation (NSF) and thus joined EXEB. Beatriz Willink started as a PhD-position in August. Thus, both influx and outflux in terms of members, and currently Tobias is in the process of recruiting several postdocs, so I anticipate that the EXEB meetings will be enriched by new faces with interesting new backgrounds soon.

In terms of major research grants, it has also been a succesful year. Both Jessica and I got grants from the Crafoord Foundation this spring, and Tobias got a three-year grant from the Swedish Research Council in November. It is if course very satisfying to get these grants, given the stiff competition and small margins these days, as they also help us to do the research we really want to do.

Publication-wise, it has also been a good year, with articles appearing in many good journals. For me and Jessica, perhaps the highlight was our PNAS-article about sexual selection on Wing Interference Patterns (WIP:s) in Drosophila melanogaster, and all the media attention it got. Tobias and his co-workers made a splash in Nature in October this year with their provocative essay "Does evolutionary theory need a rethink?", which also resulted in a discussion on this blog.

What about 2015 and the future? I am optimistic in both the short- and the long-term. I feel that we have been able to build a creative space for us as PI:s and for our students and postdocs and that we have an excellent platform to strengthen evolutionary biology in Lund within our department. It is now almost five years since the Department of Biology in Lund was formed as a merger between two old departments: The Department of Ecology and the Department of Cell- and Organismal Biology (COB). Evolutionary biology has, for several complex and historical reasons, not had a very strong visible profile in Lund.

The reasons for this historical neglect of evolutionary biology in Lund are both structural and a result of strong  and very biased personal opinions by past and some current leaders of our department. For several reasons (I strongly disagree with these views, however), evolutionary biology has not been percceived as a "real" or independent research field in Lund. Worse, it has sometimes even been dismissed by some with the argument that "everybody does evolutionary biology" or even "we should leave evolutionary biology to Uppsala instead, it is they who have an Evolutionary Biology Centre (EBC)".

Needless to say, I think these views are both wrong and outdated, but their existence points to some of the problems that we have ahead of us if we want to strengthen the evolutionary biology profile in Lund. I feel that it is more or less futile to try to convince the leadership at the department as a whole that evolutionary biology should become of one of Lund's profile research areas, because conservatism tends to increase up along the career ladder.

Instead, we need to build from below, by setting a good example: by recruiting excellent postdocs and PhD-students (which we do already have), by getting grants and by publishing our research in excellent high-quality scientific journals. Then, and only then, can we influence the department at the higher level and force the leadership to admit that evolutionary biology is indeed an independent and interesting research field in itself that deserves some higher recognition than it currently has got. And to achieve this goal, we should try to keep EXEB what it is already: an intellectually very dynamic research environment where we regularly meet and discuss science and exchange idéas, co-supervise students and postdocs and share equipment, skills and knowledge.

We should of course always be aware of the competition with other groups - both from within the department and from outside - but also do not hesitate to collaborate with other groups, such as the Theoretical and Population Ecology Group or Molecular Ecology and Evolution Laboratory, when it can help us to achieve our long-term goals to influence the Biology Department and strengthen evolutionary biology in Lund. 

Thankyou all for a very nice 2014 and see you again in 2015!

Travel trip report and slide show from South Africa followed by "Evolutionary Biology for the 21th century"

Navy dropwing (Trithemis furva). Photo: Erik Svensson

Posted by Erik Svensson

During the lab-meeting next week (Tuesday April 2), I will show some nature pictures from our recent research and field work trip to eastern South Africa (from the provinces of KwaZulu Natal, Mupalanga and Limpopo) that I recently did with Anna Nordén, John Waller and Johannis Danielsen. 



After that, we will discuss a recent essay in PLoS Biology, entitled "Evolutionary Biology for the 21th Century", authored by Losos et al. This paper is published "Open Acess", and can be accessed here.

This thought-provoking essay should be an must-read for anyone interested in the future of the general research field of evolutionary biology. The paper has already sparked some interest in the bloggosphere, such as here and here. Of particular interest is their coining of a new term - "Biodiversity informatics", and what it might entail.

The more general questions, I think, are these: are the authors likely to be correct in their predictions about the future of our field, and if not, what have they missed? And where are we in this picture in our research group in relation to the rest of the evolutionary biology research community? How could we contribute?

Time: Tuesday April 2, 10.30
Place: "Argumentet", 2nd floor (Ecology Building)

Final reminder to Anna and John: could you bring fika? Also, send some of your best pictures to me well before Tuesday, so I can put them together in to our slide show.

Happy New Year 2012! Let's start with some social activity and a lab-meeting

I hope everybody have enjoyed your well-deserved holidays, and you are now full of energy when returning to Lund! What else could then be better than to start with some social activity? I suggest we aim for this on Tuesday January 3 2012, when we meet at 18.00 at the pub "Bishop Arms" in Lund. We will then have time to eat (if we wish to), and can decide if we want to stay in the pub the whole evening, go to another one, or even go for a late movie around 21.00.

A new year also means new intellectual and scientific challenges. One such challenge is to always question old "truths", including once own's scientific biases. One such "truth", which I have myself defended in a recent blog post, is the importance of carefully distinguishing between proximate and ultimate explanations in evolutionary biology. I wrote this blog post after a recent ASAB-meeting in London in December, when both I and Machteld Verzijden were critical of Malin Ah-Kings suggestion that evolutionary explanations ("ultimate" explanations" for why animals reproduce ("animals reproduce to maximize their fitness") could be replaced by the proximate explanation ("animals reproduce for the sake of pleasure"). As I pointed out, these two explanations are not mutually exclusive, but rather complementary, and adress different "layers" of reality.

My own position here is not very controversial, but rather mainstream among today's evolutionary biologists, and I referred to the important conceptual insights by evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr and ethologist Niko Tinbergen, who laid the groundwork for this way of viewing nature and biology. It is now 50 years ago since Ernst Mayr published his important paper in Science entitled "Cause and effect in biology", and time is therefore mature to return to this classic paper and critically examine if its main message is still valid. We should therefore read this paper on this weeks lab-meeting (Wednesday, January 4 at 13.00), together with a new critical review in the same journal by Kevin Laland and colleagues entitled: "Cause and Effect in Biology Revisited: is Mayr's Proximate.Ultimate Dichtomy Still useful?"

These two papers should be read in conjunction (download them here and here), and well ahead before the lab-meeting, as these are important but difficult concepts which hold a central position in evolutionary biology. In particular, we should ask ourselves if Mayr's rigid dichotomy and position (he was rigid in many other areas, e. g. sympatric speciation) is still useful, or if it hampers further conceptual advances, as argued by Laland et al. Could it even be that Mayr's position at the time when it was formulated was necessary to get rid of "murky thinking", just like George C. Williams hardcore gene selectionist standpoint was necessary to get rid of naive group selectionism? But could it be so that both the proximate-ultimate dichotomy and the dogmatic gene selectionist standpoint have now played out their role, as the former naive views have since long been abandoned and pose no serious threat anymore to clear thinking?

Lab-meeting details and reminder: Wednesday January 4, in "Argumentet" at 13.00. Any fika volunteer?

ESEB-meeting in Tuebingen (Germany) 20-25 August 2011

The European Evolutionary Biology meeting ("ESEB") is quickly approaching, and several current and past members of our laboratory will participate, either with posters or with talks. The scientific programme looks really exciting and can be found here.  I will try to publish one or several blog posts with my impressions from the conference, and I would encourage all of you who read this and have permission to publish on the blog to also do so, to share our experiences and impressions with others.

I will give a talk myself as invited speaker in the session "Speciation by natural versus sexual selection" on Wednesday August 24. PhD-student Anna Runemark from our lab was also offered the opportunity to give a talk about her work on inbreeding and purging of the genetic load in island populations of lizards, and it will take place the same day as mine.

Also, our incoming postdoc from Japan, Dr. Yuma Takahashi, will give a talk about frequency-dependent evolutionary dynamics of genetic polymorphisms in Ischnura senegalensis on Sunday August 21 at 11.00 in the "Life-history"-session. Do not miss it! Apart from these three talks, there will also be poster contributions from former lab-member Jessica Abbott and current postdocs Kristina Karlsson Green, Machteld Verzijden, Maren Wellenreuther and Sophia Engel, as well as several other contributions from the Department of Biology in Lund, of course.

I am very much looking forward to this meeting, and I hope to be able to talk to most of you, perhaps even gather the whole crowd of current, former and incoming lab-members and go for a dinner together. Perhaps Tuesday evening (August 23)? Let's try to get in touch during the meeting, even though it will be difficult in the large crowd of evolutionary biologists.

Can phylogenetic methods from evolutionary biology inform us about how societies evolve?

This coming lab-meeting (Wednesday 27 October), I was thinking that we should discuss if and how methods from evolutionary biology can elucidate problems studied by political scientists: the rise and fall of societies. There is an interesting article published in Nature, where the authors used phylogenetic methods to investigate if societies evolved towards more complexity (or not). The study was performed on a set of societies in South-East Asia and in the Pacific.  

Evolutionary biologist and community ecologist Jared Diamond has an interesting perspective about the study. Read both the comment by Diamond and the original article so that we can have an interesting discussion on Wednesday. Time and place as usual: "Darwin" at 10.15. Below is the abstract and title of the original paper:

Rise and fall of political complexity in island South-East Asia and the Pacific  

Thomas E. Currie,Simon J. Greenhill, Russell D. Gray, Toshikazu Hasegawa & Ruth Mace 

There is disagreement about whether human political evolution has proceeded through a sequence of incremental increases in complexity, or whether larger, non-sequential increases have occurred. The extent to which societies have decreased in complexity is also unclear. These debates have continued largely in the absence of rigorous, quantitative tests. We evaluated six competing models of political evolution in Austronesian-speaking societies using phylogenetic methods. Here we show that in the best-fitting model political complexity rises and falls in a sequence of small steps. This is closely followed by another model in which increases are sequential but decreases can be either sequential or in bigger drops. The results indicate that large, non-sequential jumps in political complexity have not occurred during the evolutionary history of these societies. This suggests that, despite the numerous contingent pathways of human history, there are regularities in cultural evolution that can be detected using computational phylogenetic methods.

A new synthesis between community ecology and evolutionary biology?

On the lab-meeting this coming Wednesday (12 May, 2010), I would like to discuss a review article in TREE about the (possible) new and emerging synthesis between community ecology and evolutionary biology. You can download this article here. Hopefully, we can have a good and conceptually rich dicussion about the general message in this paper.

The lab-meeting the week after this one (i. e. May 17, 2010), I was planning to have a lab-meeting outdoors, meet the spring and (hopefully!) see the first emerged odonates of the year, followed by lunch at cosy outdooor museum and restaurant Kulturens Östarp. Stay tuned, more info soon.

Time and place for the coming lab-meeting the current week as usual:

Where: "Darwin"-room, 2nd floor, Ecology Building
When: May 10 2010, 10.15

Any fika-volunteer?

No lab-meeting the coming weeks, but some exciting symposia

This week's Wednesday (28 October), we will not have our usual lab-meeting, and we will probably have a break for a couple of weeks for now, due to (among other things) teaching activities and CAnMove-PI meeting on my part. However, in case somebody wants to utilize "Darwin" on Wednesday, the room is booked between 10 and 12. Feel free to use it!

On Monday and Tuesday, Caroline Isaksson and Tobias Uller from EGI at Oxford University, will visit the department and give two talks (organized by Maria von Post and Andreas Nordén). I would strongly recommend you to go to these seminars, which will take place in the "Red Room" (adjacent to the "Blue Hall"). On Monday there will two regular research seminars on the afternoon, while on Tuesday there will be a "mini-symposium" about applied and societal aspects of ecological research, where I will also contribute with a talk. Here is the schedule for both days:

SEMINAR 26TH OF OCTOBER14.00-15.00 Causes and consequences of oxidative stress in wild animalsCaroline Isaksson

15-15.30 Coffee

15.30-16.30 Why is Sex Determination in Reptiles so Variable? Integrating Development, Ecology & EvolutionTobias Uller


APPLIED ECOLOGICAL SCIENCE - WORKSHOP 27TH OF OCTOBER
Titles and presenters:

1. What can evolutionary ecologists contribute to medicine?
Insights and Inspiration from the World Health Summit
Dr. Tobias Uller, EGI, Oxford University

2. From selfish genes to group selection - implications for society
Prof. Erik Svensson, Lund University

3. Urban ecology
Dr. Caroline Isaksson, EGI, Oxford University

4. Attitudes and biodiversity
Dr. Johan Ahnström, Lund University

Coffee will be served during the afternoon.

Moreover, there will also be another exciting symposium next week, on Friday (30 October), namely a "Darwin-symposium" , organized by the Royal Academy of Sciences and the Royal Physiographic Society (main organizer: Professor Eric Warrant). The speakers include professors Dan-Eric Nilsson from Lund, Siv Andersson from Uppsala and legendary sociobiologist and evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers from the US. Do not miss this! The symposium is a full-day symposium, and you will find more information and directions here. All the talks will take place at "Palaestra" at the main university area (close to "AF-borgen").

Write a blogpost about evolution, compete, get famous and win a ticket to an interesting conference!

When I started blogging, I was met with a lot of scepticism among many of my colleagues, who were very suspicious about the bloggosphere. "It is waste of time", or "Why are you doing this?" where two common knee-jerk reactions, especially among some of the more senior members of our department. I always felt these reactions said more about the people who expressed them, than it said anything about the utility of blogging. Remarkably, some senior members still have these opinions, although they have now been prooven wrong so many times over and over again, so you do not hear these stupid comments much more in the open.

In my opinion, blogging is an excellent new form of communication, that is here to stay. However, blogging is only one new form of communication, and it will certainly not replace all other forms of communication. But blogging is a new information channel, and it would be as stupid to dismiss this new communication channel today, as it would have been to be against the television in the 1940-ties or the phones about 100 years ago. How could one be against new ways of communicating science and other important issues?

Today, we have several interesting research blogs in the Ecology Building apart from this one: Anders Hedenströms "Animal Flight Lab" and the "CAnMove"-blog being two excellent examples of such interesting research group blogs. There is now also a general agreement among many scientists that "Public Outreach" (which blogs are one example of), can actually be beneficial to you also in your scientific career. Is anybody really surprised?

The negative views against blogging among some of my colleagues reminds me about the scepticism against "Open Access" (OA)-publishing a few years earlier, and the scepticism against PLoS ONE in particular. I am quite amazed about how extremely conservative many scientists are against new things: blogs, social media like Facebook or OA-publishing. These new means of communication are here to stay - and it does actually not matter if this-or-that less known second-grade researcher at Lund University says about these phenomena, as long as they work and accepted by the broader international scientific community.

It is after all the international arena that is important - not what less-informed self-proclaimed "experts" claim at stupid coffee-room discussions in the Ecology Building. It is therefore with great satisfaction I can tell the readers of this blog that PLoS ONE was recently awarded a prestigious price for the most innovative scientific journal in 2009. This award was provided by the very prestigious organisation ALPSP ("The Association for learned and Professional Society Publishers"). The motivation for providing this award to PLoS ONE was partly:

"in recognition of a truly innovative approach to any aspect of publication. Applications are judged on their originality and innovative qualities, together with their utility, benefit to their community and long term prospects. Any area of innovation is eligible – it could, for example, be a novel type of print or online publication or service, or even a radically different approach to a marketing campaign."

(Need I say that nobody from backward university Lund is involved in this organisation?)

Part of PLoS ONE's and other PLoS-journals success is the approach to provide information about number of downloads and citation indices in conjunction with each published article, something that will hopefully make it even more attractive to publish in PLoS, as it is clearly an "added value" to have access to this information directly from the article -rather than having to go through a data-base like ISI (for instance). Inlinks, links to blogs and other articles citing the focal article will all contribute to increase the reader traffic to PLoS-articles in the near future. For instance, here you can see such information statistics for an article in PLoS ONE that Tom Gosden and I published two years ago, we have now more than 10 citations and almost 2000 downloads! Not bad, in my opinion.

But also scientific blogging is a growing activity, that becomes more and more important, both for journalists and for scientists like us who would like to communicate our results to the laymen and amongst ourselves. Now you actually have a nice opportunity to write a blogpost about evolution and win a price. You can read more about this competition here and on the blog "A blog around the clock".

Basically, if you write a blogpost about some evolution-theme, you could send in that blogpost (i. e. the URL) and participate in the competition of the best blogpost. The award to the winner is quite nice: you will get 750 US$ to cover the costs of attending a science communication conference: "Science Online 2010", that will take place in North Carolina in early 2010. The competition is funded by the "National Evolutionary Synthesis Centre" (NESCENT), a prestigious scientific centre in North Carolina, funded by the National Science Foundation.

This particular blog is a group blog, and not my private one, meaning that anyone one of us could send in a blogpost and participate in this competition, if you wish. Or we could nominate on of us, if we think that there is some particular blogpost that you found especially interesting. I would encourage you all to seriously consider this possibility, even though you should feel no pressure to participate if you do not wish to. However, I hope the general message goes through: blogging can be useful. Also for scientists interested in evolutionary biology. Don't listen to the nay-sayers! They are just loosers and yesterday's scientists. Just as they were wrong on OA-publishing and PLoS ONE, they will be wrong on blogs and Facebook. With historical hindsight, they will be laughed upon.

ESEB-meeting in Turin: impressions from first day

I am currently in Turin (Italy), participating in the European Evolutionary Biology Meeting, organized by European Society for the Study of Evolutionary Biology (ESEB). I travelled down to Italy with a dozen of my colleagues from the Ecology Department by train, a nice trip that took about 24 hours. We passed through the Alps and enjoyed the sight of the extensive grape fields in northern Italy before we reached our final destination. A nice experience that was also both climate-smart and environmentally friendly, compared to the usual flight trip.

What has happened this first day? Well, Hanna Kokko from University of Helsinkki gave an excellent keynote plenary about the need to incorporate ecology, particularly population dynamics, in evolutionary studies (and not only genetic factors). Being an ecologist myself, I could not agree more, and actually, tomorrow (Wednesday August 26) I am hosting a full-day symposium about the need to incorporate ecology, particularly information about selective agents (predators, parasites, inter- and intraspecific competitors etc.) and selective causes in studies of natural and sexual selection in the wild. Our two invited speakers tomorrow are Stevan J. Arnold and Craig Benkman, two well-known field evolutionary ecologists who have done excellent work in this spirit in natural populations of birds (crossbills) and amphibians (salamanders).

Back to Hanna Kokko. One of her most interesting points today was a critical re-evaluation of Bateman's principle, the idéa that differences in gamete size of males and females (i. e. eggs and sperm) is the main explanation for differences in reproductive strategies and sex-differences in parental care. This idéa has long been popular in evolutionary psychology and classical behavioural ecology, and it was taught to me as more or less a "truth" when I took courses in behavioural ecology and animal ecology in Lund in the late 80'ties and early 90'ties.

As many other popular idéas in behavioural ecology (a field with an unfortunate tendency of forming scientific "bandwagons") it was an oversimplification and Kokko convincingly argued that there are many other ecological factors than differences in gamete size that are likely to override these initial sex-differences and which are likely to be as important (or even more important) to explain sex differences in partental care. Among these factors are the operational sex ratio (OSR), which should (all else being equal) favor more male parental care when there are few females available and less mating opportunities, for a simple reason: males might then benefit more from providing parental care than try to hunt the few females that are available in the mating pool.

I suspect that Bateman's Principle will be start to become more critically questioned among evolutionary biologists in the future, although the hardcore dogmatic ones that remain (some of them in Lund) might not give up their pet idéa that easily and might be hard to convince. Paradigm shifts in the sense of science philosopher Thomas Kuhn sometimes need that some reactionary key figures retire, before new idéas can establish themselves, and this is also true for behavioural ecology and evolutionary biology.

Talking about pet idéas, another such (in Lund and at many other places) has been the so-called "good genes"-model of sexual selection. This popular hypothesis, which has actually quite limited empirical support in spite of its extreme popularity, was almost a dogma in the nineties in Lund and Uppsala and many other animal ecology departments. The idéa is that male secondary sexual ornaments (signals), like bright feathers and colour patterns, primarily evolve through the force of indirect selection for genetic fitness benefits of offspring.

Many workers have now pointed out, among them evolutionary geneticist William Rice, that the indirect fitness benefits are quite small and likely to be "swamped" by direct fitness costs (e. g. costs of mating, as shown in fruitflies) or direct fitness benefits (e. g. benefits of male parental care, which is probably present in most birds with parental care). Thus, even if indirect fitness exist, they are unlikely to be important in explaining the evolution of secondary sexual characters, which is of course frustrating for those bird behavioural ecologists who have invested a large part of their careers and prestige in to this particular scientific bandwagon which is no longer that fashionable anymore and actually contradicted by much new data and new theoretical models.

Recently, it has also been demonstrated in fruitflies, reed deer and some other animals that fitness benefits of alleles are sex-specific and that there exists intralocus sexual conflict in the genome: genes which have a positive fitness benefits on sons often have a detrimental fitness effect on daughters, which should further diminish the indirect fitness benefits of females mating to attractive males. This topic and other obstacles to the "good genes" were adressed in a symposium entitled Are “good genes” theories of sexual selection finally sinking into the sunset?. Well, one could hope so, or at least that people in behavioural ecology start to think more critically about this issue and that they do not take these "good genes" (important or not) as much as for granted as they have done in the past.