Last spring’s Evolution 2008 conference was the largest scientific meeting in the U’s history
It wasn’t quite the Olympics or the Democratic National Convention, but the Evolution 2008 conference was the largest scientific meeting ever held on the University of Minnesota campus and a great opportunity to showcase the U to scientists from around the world.
Typically, scientific meetings are held at hotel conference centers. But there’s an evolving trend among research universities to hold them on campus, according to George Weiblen, associate professor of plant biology, who organized the event. Evolution 2008, which was held from June 20–24, featured 700 presentations and attracted 1,400 participants. The University of Minnesota was selected to host the meeting because of the number and influence of evolutionary biologists at the U, according to Weiblen.
Topics spanned fossil history through evolutionary processes that are shaping the world today. Some examples: the way plants respond to climate change and how pathogenic bacteria are evolving to elude their predators—big pharmaceutical companies.
“With the advent of modern molecular biology, evolution is having an impact on lots of fields, including genomics,” Wieblen says. “The conference reflected that.”
“Evolution provides a new way of looking at climate change because we can study the fossil record to see how the environment responded to climate changes in the past to predict how it will respond in the future.”
One hot topic was merging phylogenetic biology with spatial ecology, which means that environmental changes trigger genetic changes. Jeannine Cavender-Bares, assistant professor of ecology, evolution and behavior, and graduate students from the department gave a presentation on how Ponderosa pines changed genetically during the last major climate change.
Olivia Judson (aka Dr. Tatiana, sex therapist to the animal kingdom) provided some comic relief with a public lecture titled “The Art of Seduction: Sex, Evolution and the Public,” in which she talked about how the quirky mating habits of green spoon worms (females inhale males) and other species figure into evolution.
And there was a special workshop for K-12 teachers on teaching evolution called "Evolution 101." College of Biological Sciences faculty members Scott Lanyon, Mark Borrello, Mark Decker, Sehoya Cotner and Randy Moore participated. Conference participants were also invited on a field trip to Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve, with a tour led by Associate Director Jeff Corney.
The conference combined the annual meetings of the American Society of Naturalists, the Society for the Study of Evolution and the Society of Systematic Biologists. The Bell Museum of Natural History and the College of Continuing Education helped plan the event. From the College of Biological Sciences, 15 faculty and 30 graduate students helped out. —Peggy Rinard
