I *heart* Uppsala and other comments about the 2007 ESEB meeting
Tuesday, August 28th, 2007
I just returned from Uppsala, Sweden and the 2007 European Society for Evolutionary Biology conference. A few high points of the trip:
Fighting vertigo beneath the spires of Scandinavia’s tallest cathedral during the daily assemblage of evolutionary biologists on the front steps of Uppsala University’s main building.
Michael Majerus‘s plenary talk on the social history of the peppered moth, in which he excoriated fact-averse journalists (and Judith Hooper in particular) for destroying good science in the public consciousness, and which Nick Matzke has summarized nicely (and linked to the text of Majerus’s talk) on the Panda’s Thumb blog.
Sally Otto‘s plenary talk on the costs of sex, in which she argued that the ability of recombination to reintroduce variation lost by drift does more to explain the paradox of sex than any other hypothesis. Fantastic talk. I hope to blog more about this later.
Marlene Zuk‘s symposium talk on gender bias in science. Confession: I didn’t actually see this talk, but now wish I had. Another attendee told me about it afterwards, and I suspect it is pretty well represented by this lecture she presented last year. I hope to blog more about this later as well.