It would be good if we could publicize at evolutionary biology meetings more. At a minimum, Springer reps should bring GPEM when they attend evolution meetings.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
EC presence at biology meetings
I've just come back from a round of biology meetings. Few biologists know that evolution in silica exists. They may know that GA is "something that GARLI does", but that's about it (GARLI is a GA-based phylogeny estimation package). Every time I speak of EC, it is very well received, with surprise and wonder.
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Here's an interesting view on EC people by biologist Michael Lynch, (2007) "The frailty of adaptive hypotheses for the origins
ReplyDeleteof organismal complexity":
"All replicating populations are capable of evolution, but it has recently been argued that some species are better at it than others, with natural selection directly advancing features of genomic architecture, genetic networks, and developmental pathways to promote the future ability of a species to adaptively evolve. Such speculation, which is almost entirely restricted to molecular and cell biologists and those who study digital organisms."
This reflects the old attitude in the biology community that caused me to joint the EC community, because the interest in evolvability is central in evolutionary algorithms. But now there are at least 80 papers published every year in biology that mention the "evolution of evolvability".