Date/Time

Location
Museo di Storia Naturale di Milano
Corso Venezia 55
Milano,

Details:

Evolution Day 2013

Isole: laboratori dell’evoluzione/Islands: laboratory of evolution

Alfred Russel Wallace, 1823-1913 (a Wallace100 event)

The Evolution Day reaches its tenth edition in 2013. The subject of this year will be islands, the topic of topics for biology. A wide excursus in space and time will offer an extended overview from Mediterranean to Indian and Pacific Ocean islands, from insularity phenomena in Tanzanian mountain forests to the islands of human languages, from the extraordinary Socotran flora to the “little people” from the Island of Flores. In the field of evolution, insularity is a primary and unavoidable element of many speciation processes. Insular fossil records often provided the most important data for the reconstruction of the history of life and the understanding of evolutionary pathways. Of comparable value is the importance of the study of insular ecological communities for our comprehension of the coexistence between the robustness and frailty of ecosystems, and of the conditions which make possible the recovery of an equilibrium in disturbed environments. As in previous years, several Italian and foreign scientists have been invited to illustrate the many facets of this topic.

Valerio Sbordoni, Island biogeography and evolution: old and new standpoints

Federico Focher, Alfred Russel Wallace: a naturalist and a gentleman

Vincent Savolainen, Phylogenetics, genomics and global change: understanding the past to enlighten the future

Sir David Charles Baulcombe, Epigenetics – another dimension in evolution

Massimo Delfino, Reptiles, amphibians, fossils and islands

Tony Miller, Flora of Socotra

Michele Menegon, Sky islands of East Africa: biogeography of a continental archipelago

Marco Masseti, Mammals of the Mediterranean islands: homogenisation and the loss of biodiversity

Elisa Locatelli, Small mice grow up: the evolution of rodents on islands

Giorgio Manzi, Homo floresiensis: the strange case of the “little people” from the Island of Flores, Indonesia

Nicola Grandi, Isolation and insularity as parameters of linguistic analysis

Telmo Pievani, Marco Ferrari, “The social conquest of Earth”, a dialogue on E.O. Wilson’s latest book

Educational activities for children and their families on Sunday 10^th