On February 12th, 1809 Charles Rhttp://beatymuseum.ubc.ca/obert Darwin was born in a place just called “The Mount”. Mr. Darwin is most famous for having stinky feet, being a huge backgammon nerd, and being very interested in nipples. He wrote a few books, some that were read more than others, but since Mr. Darwin was such a huge nerd, and museum nerd we will celebrate his life at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at UBC! All the talks will be held underneath the large blue whale, and admission will include access to the awesome Beaty Museusm exhibits! There will be a Darwin Cake contest as well if you get there early. Check out the photos from last year!
Where: Beaty Biodiversity Museum
When: Friday February 12th, Darwin Cake Competition 4:30; Doors and Drinks @ 6:30; Talks @ 7:30
Tickets: $9 online
Photos by: www.lindsaysdiet.com
#1 The hidden lives of galaxies
Dr. Laura Ferrarese
When peering into the cosmos, astronomers can only gather instantaneous snapshots of celestial objects whose evolution — with rare exceptions — unfolds on timescales far too long to be probed within a human lifetime. To complicate things further, what our instruments can actually “see” adds up to less than 5% of the matter/energy content of the Universe. Take galaxies, for instance: with their evolution controlled by black holes and dark matter, neither of which our instruments can probe directly, there is much more than meets the eye! This lecture will focus on how galaxies are transformed throughout cosmic times, how they interact with each other and with the environment in which they live, and how the 5% we can see can tell us about the 95% we cannot see.
Bio: Dr. Ferrarese is an internationally recognised leader in galaxy dynamics and scaling relations, supermassive black holes, active galactic nuclei, and the extragalactic distance scale. Her seminal work on the relationship between the masses of supermassive black holes and the stellar velocity dispersions of the bulges in their host galaxies has led to the realization that black holes play a very important role in the evolution of galaxies. Dr. Ferrarese works for the National Research Council of Canada, Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophisics Program, in Victoria, BC.
#2 Seductive Spiders
Dr. Wayne Maddison
Bio: After discovering the charms of spiders as a teenager, Dr. Wayne Maddison pursued them through studies at the University of Toronto and then Harvard University. He has discovered many species new to science in field work around the world, and brought them back to the lab to reconstruct their evolutionary relationships. He is widely known for his work on computational methods to interpret evolutionary history. He is Professor and Canada Research Chair at UBC, Director of the Spencer Entomological Collection of the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.”
#3 Can Darwin Help Us Save the Planet
Dr. Arne Mooers
Darwinian evolution has produced a lot of oddities through the ages. And here’s a conundrum: conservation biologists tell us we need to save biodiversity in order to save ourselves – but all of it? Even the boring bits? Even the weird stuff? How do we prioritize? How do we get anyone to care about any of it, really? These are actually pretty serious questions, and perhaps Darwinian evolution offers a partial answer. If we are serious about conserving biodiversity, then we are serious about conserving Darwin’s Tree of Life. I will explain the reasoning behind this, introduce folks to bits of biodiversity that contribute a lot to this Tree (some of it pretty odd, for sure), and see if you agree or disagree with a call to arms to save the Fuglies.
Bio: Arne Mooers is a pretty strait-laced biology professor at Simon Fraser University. An Azimov-loving Sci Fi child nerd whose aspiration at age 10 was to win the Nobel prize, Arne tried very hard to be cool in high school, and so pretended he was a jock – which was ridiculous, because he was about 5 feet 6 inches tall, and badminton doesn’t count. So he went to McGill, and then to Oxford, and eventually got a job here in Vancouver, where he teaches evolution to undergraduates and cross country skiing to the very young.