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Tuesdays Foege Building (that's the new one on 15th avenue near Agua Verde) room S-040 (not S-110 as listed in Time Schedule) (the small conference room in the middle of the Ground floor) 12:30pm - 1:20pm |
This quarter the Evolution and Population Genetics will run on Tuesdays at 12:30 (yes, sorry, it conflicts with MathBio seminar).
I alternate between population-genetic and phylogeny topics, and this year it's phylogeny's turn. We will be taking volunteers to lead a session, which does not mean doing all the talking but does mean reading the paper assigned and making some cogent remarks, and helping stimulate discussion among all the other people, who will of course have read the paper too. Of course people registered for the course will be compelled to volunteer.
| Dates | Topic | Discussion leader |
| January 9 | Orientation/introductions | |
| January 16 | Trees of inversions in Drosophila | Yuan Yaowu |
| January 23 | Trees from gene expression levels | Chris Himes |
| January 30 | Linguistic trees | Chad Brock |
| February 6 | Manuscript trees | Megan Carney |
| February 13 | Y chromosome trees | Charla Lambert |
| February 20 | (no session: I will be away this week) | |
| February 27 | Trees of cells and organs | Chul Joo Kang |
| March 6 | Adaptive radiation and the scaling of evolutionary rates | Luke Harmon (UBC) |
| March 13 | TBA | Bob Karn |
(more will appear here soon, and suggestions will be appreciated)
Links to PDFs or links to UW library electronic copies of the paper are here -- these will work from the UW domain, or from off campus if you have a UW NetID username and password.
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Charla Lambert writes:
For next Tuesday's seminar discussion, I plan to focus on only two of the
three papers listed on the course Website:
1) The Underhill PA, et al. Nature Genetics letter http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v26/n3/full/ng1100_358.html 2) The Genetics paper on Oceania http://www.genetics.org/cgi/content/full/160/1/289 The first reference above is credited with revealing much of the structure behind the world-wide Y-chromosome phylogeny. The PNAS paper that's listed on the Web site is a much larger and more thorough study, but ultimately the two are pretty similar. I included the paper on Oceania to continue some of the discussion started a few weeks ago on linguistic trees. It would be great to compare and contrast the conclusions reached by the two approaches (i.e., genetic and linguistic). See you next Tuesday |
| Abstract of Luke Harmon's talk: The evolutionary dynamics of phenotypic change provides key insights into macroevolutionary processes. One of the few results that generalizes from short-term studies of experimental evolution to long- term paleontological studies is the scaling of evolutionary rates: net rates of evolutionary change appear fastest over the shortest time scales. One explanation of this pattern invokes the effects of constraints on phenotypic evolution; the cumulative effects of constraints, such as stabilizing selection or developmental limits to adaptation, will be most apparent over long time scales. Alternatively, changing rates may reflect the dynamics of adaptive radiation, with trait evolution slowing as organisms near their selective optima and ecological space becomes filled with competitors. Here explicitly test these two models and show that, among a wide range of animal taxa, models of adaptive radiation provide the best fit to our comparative data. We hypothesize that the rate of body size evolution is highest just after a group has entered a new adaptive zone and subsequently slows as ecological space is filled. This result provides support for Simpson's suggestion that much of life's diversity originated during adaptive radiations. |