Evolvability?

Really?  Seriously?  Ok, let’s see what he can show.

Evolvability is the capacity of an organism to generate novel, heritable, phenotypic changes. Marc Kirschner explains how evolvability happens and how we might better understand its role in biology. Talk Overview: Marc Kirschner begins his talk by defining evolvability as the capacity of an organism to generate phenotypic novelty, particularly novelty that is useful and heritable. He goes on to explain that evolvability may be driven by just a few mechanisms. For example, changing the time or place in which a gene is expressed may be sufficient to generate a novel phenotype without requiring a change in the gene product. Until we have a better understanding of how genes map to phenotypes, however, it remains difficult to understand the nature of evolvability. Kirschner suggests that perhaps advances in computational learning will help us to decipher how evolvability works through biology. Speaker Biography: In 1993, Dr. Marc Kirschner joined Harvard University where he became the founding chair of the Department of Cell Biology. In 2003, he moved to Harvard Medical School to found the Department of Systems Biology. Research in Kirschner’s lab focuses on problems that require the coordination of biological events in time and space. His lab has made significant contributions in embryology, cell cycle regulation and cellular organization. Kirschner was an undergraduate student at Northwestern University and received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. After a brief stint as a post-doc at Berkeley and the University of Oxford, Kirschner joined the faculty at Princeton University. He later moved to the University of California, San Francisco where he was a professor for 15 years before moving to Harvard. Kirschner is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also an elected foreign member of both the Royal Society and the Academia Europaea. In 2003, Kirschner was awarded the E.B. Wilson Medal, the highest honor of the American Society for Cell Biology. Kirschner is the co-author, with John Gerhart, of two popular books Cells, Embryos and Evolution and The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma.