THE LINNAEAN SOCIETY OF NEW YORK SPEAKERS PROGRAM
Tuesday, Feb 22, 2011, 7:30 p.m.
The American Museum of Natural History, Linder Theater
Speaker: David Lahti, Assistant Professor, Department of Biology, Queens
College CUNY
Subject: The Evolution of Bird Behavior
Studying animal behavior from an evolutionary perspective has led to the
realization that genes and environment, nature and nurture, cooperate to
guide the development of traits. This is true even of very plastic or
changeable traits, such as those that involve learning. However, we still
have a limited understanding of behavioral evolution. Behavior is often so
developmentally distant from the genes, and controlled by so many genes,
that we cannot very easily determine whether and how it can evolve. Birds
are valuable study organisms for this purpose because they have relatively
short generation times for a vertebrate, have many traits that involve
significant learning, and are easily studied both in the wild and (for some
species) in the laboratory. This talk will describe two studies that show how
complex
traits that involve learning can evolve by natural selection. The first
deals with African weavers, whose eggs are distinctively colored and
patterned in order to avoid being fooled by the eggs of a parasitic cuckoo.
In the other case study, male swamp sparrows sing to attract mates and repel
intruders, and their songs are more effective when they are faster. Both
egg recognition in weavers and song production in sparrows are heavily
dependent on learning, and yet experimental studies demonstrate how they can
evolve by natural selection. These examples show how closely inheritance
and learning can work together to guide both the development and the
evolution of behavior.
David Lahti received a Ph.D. in philosophy of biology in 1998 from the
Whitefield Institute at Oxford, UK and a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary
biology in 2003 from the University of Michigan. He is widely published in
ornithology. He has been the recipient of several awards including the Wilson
Ornithological Society Louis Agassiz Fuertes Award in 2000 and the American
Museum of Natural History Chapman Memorial Award also in 2000. Some of his
research interests are brood parasitism and coevolution in weaverbirds,
development and evolution of bird song learning, and the ecology and evolution
of egg color in birds.
The meeting is open to the public, without charge. Please join us
for what promises to be a very exciting talk. Enter the Museum at West 77th
Street. If you would like to meet Dr. Lahti 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
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