The lecture will be preceeded by a free lunch for all attendees, starting at 12:30.
The lecture by Prof. Doolittle will start at 13:00.
Darwinizing Gaia
After a brief review, stressing why the Gaia Hypothesis has been and still is rejected by mainstream Darwinists, I’ll go through three scenarios (the first one a failure, the next two distinctly possible) by which we might align the Gaia Hypothesis with Darwinian thinking, albeit not mainstream.
About the speaker
W. Ford Doolittle attended Harvard (BA 1963) and Stanford (PhD 1969), before taking a position at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. He has always been interested in combining empirical and theoretical work, having been responsible for proving – or speculating boldly – (1) that organelles were once free-living bacteria, (2) that “jumping genes” are “selfish DNAs”, (3) that interruptions to higher organism’s DNAs are recent additions (contrary to what he once thought), and (4) that lateral (between-species) gene transfer compromises any attempt to reconstruct a “Tree of Life”. For 20 years he directed the Evolutionary Biology Programme of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, which has made Canada uniquely strong in early cell and genome evolution. According to GoogleScholar, his h-index is 97 and his work has been cited almost 40,000 times.
For his achievements he received the 2013 Gerhard Herzberg Gold Medal, Canada’s top science prize, accompanied by a million-dollar unrestricted research grant, and the Killam Prize of the Canada Council, Canada’s other most-coveted award. He is a member of The US National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and (since 2023) of the UK’s Royal Society. Now he pursues philosophy of biology, focusing on function and natural selection.
The ONE EARTH lecture series is organised by Prof. Paul Wilmes and the Systems Ecology research group.
