several days ago was completed Evolution 2010, Congress set three major scientific societies: Society for the Study of Evolution, Society of Systematic Biologists, American Society of Naturalists . Although many years had wanted to, this was the first time I participated in this conference and was well worth it, definitely I think I will attend.
Congress, as anticipated, was huge and it was very easy to make contacts and meet people. It was rather the opportunity to see a lot of talk (and well, lost 11 per each one could see!) And learn enough. They say that the congress a year ago was the dominant theme of using niche modeling applications to evolutionary questions, this year, definitely the hottest topic was the application of new techniques for sequencing and genomic approaches (or transcriptomics ) to address all sorts of evolutionary questions. A few months ago I wrote here that, at one time, much of what that has been done with data based on sequences of one or a few genes to address evolutionary questions seem to be outdated and that time will be fulfilled quickly. So, I returned with many ideas and willingness to learn to go a bit starting to reinvent what we do.
conference There very good and varied, from non-master (but part of symposia) enjoyed the most were the Amy Angert (with my John Paul and friends as co Seema Sheth) on phenotypic divergence in the margins of the geographic distributions plants of the genus Mimulus and the Renée Duckworth about everything one could it Happen in relation to the evolution of strategies of colonization in a bird species . Both presentations showed a huge amount of data generated to answer several key questions in evolutionary ecology, very impressive.
The plenary lectures were given by the presidents of each of the societies. First, Jonathan Losos , president of ASN, discussed the use and abuse of phylogenies in comparative biology, emphasizing how many phylogenetic approaches can be useless and sometimes counterproductive to try to resolve evolutionary questions. In particular, criticized the use of molecular phylogenies to reconstruct ancestral character states (which he did many times in the past) and to estimate speciation and extinction rates without data from the fossil record, insisted on the importance of not assuming that the species closely related are ecologically similar and made a lot of emphasis on the fact that the phylogeny is only a pattern, calling for the abolition phylogenetic restriction of the term (ie phylogenetic constraint). Actually, apart from that everything he said seemed wise, it seemed a bit superficial and the message was obvious: to use phylogeny in evolutionary studies, we must use it - perhaps the talk would have been more innovative and effective at a conference ecology. The next day spoke John Huelsenbeck, president of SSB. The truth did not understand many details about their exposure from the use of models in phylogenetics, but I found it interesting his argument that from a viewpoint of model selection, the parsimony method is perhaps the least parsimonious of which exist to reconstruct phylogenies, as opposed to models of molecular evolution, parsimony has a huge amount of parameters. Finally spoke Allen Orr, president of SSE. Orr suggested that the study of the origin of new species appears to be no radically new ideas generated in recent years in contrast to what happened decades ago, and went further to suggest that an important difference between physics and evolutionary biology is that the first is advanced generating new radical ideas that are quickly refuted and replaced by other ideas in evolutionary biology the status quo seems to prevail. Orr also dared to propose the hypothesis that in cases where isolation mechanisms between species operate before intercourse, it is likely that the dominant force in speciation is natural selection, but in cases where incompatibilities between species are post-mating, processes such as meiotic drive would be responsible for the origin of reproductive isolation.
Besides the above, what impressed me most of the congress was the large participation of Colombian evolutionary biologists. Although the creation of the network ColEvol few years ago and the two events that the network has organized through the work of Margarita Ramos and Cristina Lopez, among others, demonstrated some time ago that evolutionary biology is in a Colombian fairly high level and getting better, what I saw at the conference struck me very positively. First, the amount of Colombian participants was very large and certainly much greater than any other Latin American country. Furthermore, the quality of the presentations and diversity of topics discussed for researchers based in Colombia and abroad was outstanding. I think a few years ago, nobody would have imagined that a meeting like this would Colombian presenting on topics as diverse as coral systematic, diet and toxicity of poison frogs, the evolution of individual variation in communication strategies, phenotypic evolution in a family of birds, ecological speciation in a gradient of elevation , origin and evolution of an invasive variety of rice, bird comparative phylogeography based on coalescent models, reconstruction of tree species based on sequences of multiple loci, experimental demography of herbivorous insects to receive new diets, chromosomal inversions coalescent models, developments hybrid incompatibilities Drosophila, the evolution of color patterns in frogs, evolution of sociality and hipercarnivoría in dogs, barriers to gene flow between species of sunflowers, the expression of candidate genes involved with color in butterflies, evolution and geographic variation in chemical signals in bees, genetic evidence of speciation by hybridization in butterflies, the effect of diversification rates on the spatial pattern of South American bird diversity, development restrictions and their effect on the evolution of allometry in moth history evolution life and fish body shape, adaptation acoustic frogs, genetic diversity in sexual and asexual populations of snails, and probably a few more that I pass (receipt additions). No, but it seems so good!
