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The price of the pouch

By news editor, on 19 December 2011

Jack Ashby writes about the last UCL Lunch Hour Lecture of 2011, held on 8 December.

Every zoologist has their own favourite group of animals, and mine is marsupials. However, this group sometimes suffer a lot of stick from the more common type of zoologist who studies placental mammals. They say marsupials are boring, stupid, primitive, too few in number and are altogether inferior to ‘normal’ mammals. I was hoping that the Lunch Hour Lecture by Anjali Goswami (UCL Genetics, Evolution and the Environment and UCL Earth Sciences) would set some of these accusations straight.

Whenever I go to Australia to undertake ecological fieldwork I am struck by the diversity of the mammals there. You can travel 200km and find a different species of marsupial mouse doing a similar thing to the one you saw the day before, only in a slightly different environment. Go another 200km and you could find a third.

However, the three species do look pretty similar. One of the major downsides of marsupials, from a biodiversity point of view, is that they haven’t evolved the range of forms that placental mammals have. While there is a semi-aquatic species of marsupial – the yapok – it could hardly be compared with a whale or a seal; there are gliding marsupials too, but they can’t do what bats can do. Marsupials and placentals have both been evolving for the same length of time – 125 million years; why did flying, swimming or event galloping never arise in marsupials? Anjali put it down to methods of reproduction.

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Against nature? Homosexuality and evolution

By news editor, on 25 November 2011

Dave Weston reports on a Lunch Hour Lecture guaranteed to generate robust debate.

Same-sex sexual behaviour is often condemned on the grounds that it’s ‘against nature’. Indeed, biology tells us that selection favours those who leave more offspring. But then, homosexual behaviour is widespread – not only among humans, but also throughout the animal kingdom.

So, does that constitute a paradox for Darwinian theory? And is there a connection between what goes on in nature and what is morally desirable? These were the tricky questions that Professor Volker Sommer set out to address in a Lunch Hour Lecture on 17 November.

I’ve heard Volker speak several times before. His official title is Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at UCL and he’s an expert in behavioural ecology, having spent many years studying the behaviour of monkeys, apes… and people. The combination of an eminently quotable and engaging speaker with a live audience and potentially controversial subject matter meant this was always going to be a popular lecture.

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Galton Inaugural Lecture: Neurological disease – Nature and Nurture

By ucyow3c, on 31 October 2011

Now, as the health sciences finally enter a golden age of genetics, the relevancy of the Galton Chair has never been greater: this was the message of Professor Nicholas Wood’s inaugural lecture, which he delivered to a packed auditorium of colleagues, friends and family at UCL on Wednesday 19 October. UCL PhD student Gavin Charlesworth summarises the lecture below.

Professor Wood began by reflecting on the work of that illustrious scientist and pioneer in the field of genetics, Francis Galton, after whom the chair is named. He reminded the audience that Galton was responsible for many ideas that remain fundamental to the practice of genetics today, such as the regression to the mean and correlation, and famously coined the phrase ‘nature and nurture’ to describe a debate that continues to rage even today.

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Noam Chomsky: “On the Poverty of the Stimulus”

By news editor, on 17 October 2011

Professor Noam Chomsky

Dr Hans van der Koot (UCL Division of Psychology and Language Sciences) gives a short summary of Professor Noam Chomsky’s recent lecture at UCL.

On Monday 10 October, Professor Noam Chomsky (MIT) gave a presentation in the Department of Linguistics at UCL about the importance of the study of human language to our understanding of the human mind, entitled ‘On the Poverty of the Stimulus’.

A video of the lecture is available below:

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