Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academics

Distinguished Lecture Series

Title: Evolution in Action: The View from Darwin's Islands and Benzer's Bottles

Jonathan Weiner
Writer In Residence at Rockefeller University, New York City

Tuesday, December 5, 2000, at 7:30 p.m.
Auditorium, Annenberg Presidential Conference Center
Texas A&M University

Abstract

As the title, "Evolution in Action: The View from Darwin's Islands and Benzer's Bottles," implies, the presentation is about the study of evolution that is proceeding right now around us. Scientists can watch the process happening in the wild, and they can also tinker with the course of evolution in the lab, at the level of the genes. I'll argue that one of the most interesting new directions in science today is the study of genes and behavior, and I'll talk about some of the first studies of this subject by molecular biologists. This work not only opens extraordinary views (as amazing as anything in the Galapagos Islands), it also raises the disturbing possibility that human beings may someday soon have the power to alter human nature---alter our own evolution.

About the Speaker

When Jonathan Weiner was growing up, he wanted to be either a biologist or a writer. At Harvard (Class of '76), he chose writing. But soon after graduation, he found a way to do both, and has been writing about science and nature ever since.

At first Weiner wrote part-time, while working as Senior Editor of The Sciences, the magazine of the New York Academy of Sciences. In 1985, he left the magazine to write my first book, the companion volume to the PBS television series "Planet Earth" (a joint production of WQED and the National Academy of Sciences). Since that book, he has been writing full-time (or time-and-a half) in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Deborah Heiligman (who writes children's books), and their two sons, Aaron and Benjamin.

His book The Beak of the Finch won both a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science. His latest book, Time, Love, Memory, won a National Book Critics Circle Award. The book was supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. While writing it, Weiner was a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, and in the spring of 1998, he was McGraw Professor in Writing. He taught at Princeton again in the fall of 1999. In the year 2000, he became Writer In Residence at Rockefeller University, in New York City. In the spring of 2001, he will be Writer In Residence at Rockefeller, and the Rhodes Chair at Arizona State University.