6-8 November 2019
MPI for Evolutionary Biology
Europe/Berlin timezone

Keynote: The many roles of parental effects in evolutionary biology

8 Nov 2019, 09:00
30m
Lecture Hall (MPI for Evolutionary Biology)

Lecture Hall

MPI for Evolutionary Biology

Speaker

Tobias Uller

Description

There is a bewildering diversity of perspectives on parental effects. My aim in this talk is to make sense of this diversity by drawing attention to the organising role of problem agendas in evolutionary biology. I discuss and exemplify how different evolutionary problems motivate different ways to represent the relationship between parents and offspring. These representations in turn influence what aspects of biology that are considered to be relevant to evolution. While the research programs that develop around problem agendas generally happily co-exist, I use the contemporary debates over the explanatory role of ‘non-genetic inheritance’ in evolution to illustrate how different perspectives sometimes cause (unnecessary) scientific controversy.

Presentation Materials

There are no materials yet.