THE LINNAEAN SOCIETY OF NEW YORK SPEAKERS PROGRAM Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2010, 7:30 p.m. The American Museum of Natural History, Linder Theater Speaker: Richard Prum, William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology, Ecology, and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University; Curator of Ornithology and Head Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at the Peabody Museum of Natural History Subject: The Evolution of Beauty Sexual selection by mate choice is a powerful evolutionary force which creates the form of diverse sexual advertisements including many plumage color patterns, displays, and songs in birds. It is currently popular to hypothesize that most of these sexual advertisements are indicators of mate quality, but the alternative hypothesis is that these sexual signals are arbitrary– in other words "merely beautiful." The talk will explore extraordinary avian intersexual display behaviors and songs, and discuss whether quality indication theory in sexual selection can explain the actual diversity of avian signals. Prum will propose that Darwin was precisely correct in his original characterization of mate preferences as "aesthetic sensibilities," and discuss an alternative model of sexual selection as an example of a new field of study– Evolutionary Aesthetics
Richard Prum received an A.B. (1982) from Harvard University and a Ph.D. (1989) from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He has published extensively in several areas including developmental biology, optical physics, molecular genetics, phylogenetics, paleontology, and behavior ecology to address central questions about bird development, evolution, and behavior. In 2009, Richard Prum received the prestigious MacArthur Fellow Foundation Award. The meeting is open to the public, without charge. Please join us for what will undoubtedly be a very exciting talk. Enter the Museum at West 77th Street. If you would like to meet Dr. Prum prior to the talk, join us at Pappardella's Restaurant, 75th Street and Columbus Avenue at 6 p.m. The reservation will be in the name of Alice. Alice Deutsch, Vice President -- NYSbirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsRULES ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/nysbirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/NYSB.html 3) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/NYSBirds-L Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
