EVENTS

STOQ 2009 – THE STOQ INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON
«BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION. Facts and Theories»

Abstracts of the Lectures:

Douglas J. Futuyma, State University of New York (Stony Brook), USA

Taxonomic Issues: Evidence from Comparative Biology

The similarities among species became explicable only when Darwin postulated that many of them were the consequence of inheritance, perhaps with modification, from the common ancestors of those species. Thus the hypothesis that all organisms are related, as portrayed in a phylogenetic tree, is both a central claim of evolutionary biology and a framework for tracing and understanding the history and modifications of organisms’ characteristics. The common ancestry of diverse species is now considered a scientific fact, and methods for determining the relationships among species have become quite reliable. By comparing characteristics of species in this framework, a great deal has been learned about patterns and rates of evolution, including changes in anatomical form and function, evolved modifications of the embryological development of structures, changes in genes and proteins, the evolution of new genes and genetic functions, and the degeneration and loss of organs and genes that have lost their function. From the comparative anatomy and embryology of the nineteeth century to the sequencing of entire genomes in the twenty-first century, biological research has reaffirmed the principle of common descent and modification, and has provided ever deeper understanding of the pathways of evolutionary change.