Speakers
Darwin Day Tennessee is excited to have UT Alumni, Dr. Harry Greene and Dr. Rosemary Gillespie, present keynote addresses this year.Dr. Rosemary Gillespie
Inspiration from islands for understanding evolution
Wednesday, February 87:00 – 9:00 pm
University Center Auditorium
Islands provide an ideal setting for teaching us about the process of evolution. Since the time of Darwin and before, studies on islands have provided insights into the interplay between organisms and their environment in shaping evolutionary processes, including the nature and timing of species formation and accumulation of species within ecological communities. Remote islands in particular have been heralded as “natural laboratories”, with communities largely assembled from species that have evolved within the islands as a result of adaptive radiation. In my Darwin Day address I will talk about three features of island biology in particular that inform evolutionary understanding: (1) The interacting roles of dispersal and evolution in shaping the biota on islands; (2) Patterns of speciation and the nature of convergent evolution in shaping ecologically similar sets of species on different islands; (3) Genetic and morphological changes involved in the initial stages of speciation following island colonization. I illustrate these processes and what we can learn about evolution with my own studies of spiders and other arthropods on islands. Finally, I discuss our efforts to use island systems to educate the next generation of scientists about evolution and biodiversity.
Dr. Harry W. Greene
Natural history, aesthetics, and conservation
Thursday, February 97:00 – 9:00 pm
University Center Auditorium
The diversity of life on earth is under serious threats from multiple human-related causes, and science plays well-known roles in addressing management aspects of this problem. This presentation will describe how natural history also enhances our appreciation for organisms and environments, thereby potentially influencing the value judgments that ultimately underlie all conservation. I will discuss how Kant’s distinction between beauty and sublime can be combined in the context of Darwin’s notion of descent with modification, then illustrate this approach with frogs, snakes, Africa, Longhorns, and Condors.
Short Biographies
Dr. Rosemary Gillespie
Rosemary Gillespie is Director of the Essig Museum of Entomology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also Professor and holds the Schlinger Chair in Systematics. She was born and educated in Scotland, receiving her B.Sc. in Zoology from Edinburgh University in 1980. She came to the U.S. to conduct graduate work on the behavioral ecology of spiders with Dr. Susan Riechert at the University of Tennessee and received her Ph.D. in Zoology in 1986. After several months at the University of South in Tennessee, she started work at the University of Hawaii in 1987, initially as a postdoc, and in 1992 joined the faculty as Assistant Professor in Zoology and Researcher in the Hawaiian Evolutionary Biology program. Since her PhD, Gillespie's research has focused on patterns of diversification and adaptive radiation among lineages of spiders in the Hawaiian Islands. She joined the faculty at the University of California in Berkeley in 1999, where she continues her research focus on the islands of the Pacific, which serve as microcosms for studying how biodiversity forms and goes extinct. Her research has expanded geographically to include the islands of southern Oceania and the Indian Ocean. She is currently President-elect of the International Biogeography Society, Past-President of the American Arachnological Society, a Trustee and Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, and serves as Associate Editor for Molecular Ecology, and on the council of the American Genetics Association.
Dr. Harry Greene
Harry W. Greene got a B.A. from Texas Wesleyan College in 1968 and served as an army medic for three years. He earned his M.A. from University of Texas at Arlington in 1973 and Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 1977. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley for two decades, then moved to Cornell in 1999 as a professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He has studied the behavioral ecology, evolution, and conservation of predators in North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and most recently Brazil and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Harry’s honors include the Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award, American Society of Naturalists’ Edward Osborne Wilson Award, election as fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and president of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, and most recently Cornell’s Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellowship. His Snakes: the Evolution of Mystery in Nature won a PEN Literary Award and made the New York Times’ list of “100 Most Notable Books.” At Cornell he’s taught introductory biology, herpetology, desert ecology, and graduate field ecology, and his next book, Tracks and Shadows: Field Biology as Art, is nearing completion.