How new species evolve is focus of public lecture at UC Riverside

Free lecture by biologist David Reznick to address how evolution is like any other science

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – What is a species and how does speciation – the evolutionary process that results in the formation of new species – come about? How have Charles Darwin's ideas contributed to our understanding of speciation?

Evolutionary biologist David Reznick will address these questions in a public lecture he will give at UC Riverside at 7 p.m., Thursday, April 30, in the University Theatre on campus.

The title of his talk is "The Evolution of Evolution: Darwin Then and Now."

"In this talk, I will explain how evolution is an evolving topic like any other science," said Reznick, a professor of biology at UCR. "I will introduce concepts of species and speciation that came before Darwin, show how he changed our understanding of these concepts, and then discuss the modern concept of species. I will show, too, that there are actually many different ways to define species."

Reznick's hour-long talk, which includes a question-and-answer session, is free and open to the public. Doors open at 6:45 p.m. Seating is open.

At UCR, Reznick studies evolution as a contemporary process and performs experiments on natural populations of organisms. He also studies how complex traits evolve in organisms. In addition, his lab conducts experiments for testing predictions from different facets of modern evolutionary theory in natural populations of guppies (small fresh-water fish that biologists have studied for long).

Reznick decided to take up a career devoted to evolutionary biology when he was a senior in Washington University, Mo., from where he graduated in 1974.

"It was a time of high ideals and I was looking for a type of research that could give ultimate answers to why the natural world is the way it is," he said. "Evolution seemed to fulfill that ideal."

Early in his career, Reznick succeeded in experimentally testing predictions of evolutionary theory in natural populations of guppies. He showed that the rate of evolution in nature can be very high, on the order of 10,000 to 10 million times faster than had been inferred from the fossil record.

Reznick obtained his Ph. D. in biology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1980. Subsequently, he was a research associate at the University of Maryland, supported by funding from the National Science Foundation. He joined the UCR faculty in 1984.