How power explains the history of life (Ep 114)

How can organismal choices drive adaptive evolution? Can plasticity act as a kind of selection? In this episode, we talk with Pim Edelaar, a professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemical Engineering at the University Pablo de Olavide, Spain. He’s also the author of the new book The Selective Organism: An Expanded Theory of Adaptive Evolution. In the book, Pim proposes that in addition to natural selection there might be a “second driver” of adaptive evolution. We discuss the book with Pim, explore how non-genetic inheritance and plasticity underpin the theory, and talk about what implications this expanded perspective has for research. If after listening to the episode you’re interested in reading The Selective Organism, the digital version is free to download. Cover art by Brianna Longo.

How do you find an invasive species that no net can catch? What happens to the scientist whose research samples end up in federal court? In this episode, we talk with David Lodge, a freshwater ecologist at Cornell University and past president of the Ecological Society of America. In 2009, David’s lab detected invasive carp from DNA in bottles of Illinois River water, including above the electric barrier meant to keep the carp out of the Great Lakes. That result helped found the field of environmental DNA, and it brought congressional testimony, a Supreme Court filing, and five hours of unfriendly questioning on the witness stand. Drawing on David’s recent retrospective in the journal Environmental DNA, we follow the science from a cup of water to the courtroom, visit the Wisconsin lakes where the invasive crayfish he has watched for more than forty years are now collapsing on their own, perhaps driven by a parasite new to science, and ask what it takes for science to inform policy without pretending to drive it. Cover art by Brianna Longo.

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How have flowers shaped the modern world? Why do we and many other species have such intimate and long-term relationships with them? On this special episode, we talk with David George Haskell, a writer and biologist. We discuss his most recent book, How Flowers Made our World, which explores the creative powers of flowering plants. Big Biology blogger and Biology PhD student, Clayton Glasgow, interviews David as an outreach project for the Young Voices of Science program. They discuss how flowers have played key roles in many ecosystems, the genomic innovations that underpinned the success of flowering plants, and the significant relationship between humans and flowers. Cover art by Brianna Longo.

When a bee visits a flower, what decides the match? How can a neutral model explain community assemblages? Why are long-term ecological studies so important? In this episode, we talk with Diego Vázquez, a community ecologist at CONICET in Mendoza, Argentina, who has spent his career mapping the networks of interaction between plants and pollinators. Textbooks still teach coevolution as tight, faithful pairs, but Diego’s work tells a different story, that specialists mostly interact with generalists, and the best predictor of pollinator visits to plants turns out to be not matching traits or shared ancestry but abundance. Much of the structure ecologists prize in these networks can emerge from “neutral” models that know only who is common and when. We dig into why predicting these interactions remains hard, what his twenty-years of data on declining solitary bees is showing, and what it takes to keep long-term ecology alive in Argentina after deep cuts to science funding. Cover art by Brianna Longo