Others - Page 7

This Friday, November 17th, we're discussing a paper by Hagey et al. (2017): "Tempo and mode of performance evolution across multiple independent origins of adhesive toe pads in lizards".

Hope to see you there!

This Friday, November 10th, we're discussing a paper by Benson et al. (2017): "Cope's rule and the adaptive landscape of dinosaur body size evolution".

Hope to see you there!

Welcome! Open for all. Main lecture: Marcia McNutt, geophysicist and president of the US Academy of Sciences, on: "Reconciling Energy Resource Extraction with Ecosystem Health – Lessons from Deepwater Horizon". (The Fridtjof Nansen Lectures on Ocean Life are part of the UiO Day of the Arctic).

Late Lunch Talk by Tore Slagsvold, CEES, University of Oslo

This Friday, November 3rd, we're discussing a paper by Good et al. (2017): "The dynamics of molecular evolution over 60,000 generations".

Hope to see you there!

Species' responses to changes in the environment can be either genetic or plastic, and adaptive or non-adaptive. Identifying the exact nature of such responses requires integration of population models and quantitative genetics theory.

Late Lunch Talk doubleheader. We will have talks by Eric Coissac (University Grenoble-Alpes) and Melanie Monroe (CEES).

This Friday, October 27th, we're discussing a paper by Fox et al. (2017): "The social and cultural roots of whale and dolphin brains".

Hope to see you there!

Late Lunch Talk by Pål Trosvik and Eric de Muinck, CEES (UiO)

This Friday, October 20th, we're discussing a paper by Grabowski and Jungers (2017): "Evidence of a chimpanzee-sized ancestor of humans but a gibbon-sized ancestor of apes".

Hope to see you there!

This Friday, October 13th, we're discussing a paper by Tidiere et al. (2017): "Evolutionary allometry reveals a shift in selection pressure on male horn size".

Hope to see you there!

Late Lunch Talk by Frances Osis, University of Glasgow

This Friday, October 6th, we're discussing a paper by Svensson (2017): "On reciprocal causation in the evolutionary process".

Hope to see you there!

Climate can affect populations not only directly and through resource availability, but also by altering predation risk. Such interactions can lead to unexpected or counter-intuitive responses, and considering them can be important for predicting  population responses to climate change.

This Friday, September 29th, we're discussing a paper by De Lisle and Svensson (2017): "On the standardization of fitness and traits in comparative studies of phenotypic selection".

Hope to see you there!

This Friday, September 22nd, we're discussing a paper by Punzalan and Rowe (2016): "Concordance between stabilizing sexual selection, intraspecific variation, and interspecific divergence in Phymata".

Hope to see you there!

The evolution and spread of human culture are intriguing topics by themselves, but who knew cultural dynamics could be included into demographic population models?

This Friday, September 15th, we're discussing a paper by Scranton et al. (2016): "The importance of the timescale of the fitness metric for estimates of selection on phenotypic traits during a period of demographic change".

Hope to see you there!

Body size is often linked intricately with survival and reproductive rates, and therefore affects population dynamics. It is not unlikely for population collapses to be preceded by a change in body size distributions. If those changes happen long enough in advance, they may serve as early warning signals to predict population collapses.

We welcome you to two open lectures! Meave Leakey on "Milestones in the story of us – why and when did we come to be?", and Alan Alda on "Getting beyond a blind date with science". This event is part of the University’s annual celebration.

Abstract

For the human population to maintain a constant size from generation to generation, an increase in fertility must compensate for the reduction in the mean fitness of the population caused, among others, by deleterious mutations. The required increase in fertility due to this mutational load depends on the number of sites in the genome that are functional, the mutation rate, and the fraction of deleterious mutations among all mutations in functional regions. These dependencies and the fact that there exists a maximum tolerable replacement level fertility can be used to put an upper limit on the fraction of the human genome that can be functional. Mutational load considerations lead to the conclusion that the functional fraction within the human genome cannot exceed 25%, and is probably considerably lower.

paper