Campus News

Ecologist opens symposium, delivers annual Coley Lecture

Joan Roughgarden, an evolutionary ecologist from Stanford University, will deliver the annual Andrea Carson Coley Lecture at UGA on Feb. 2. Roughgarden will also be the opening speaker for the Winter Evolutionary Biology Symposium on Feb. 1.

Both events are free and open to the public.

Roughgarden is the author of Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People. The book, according to its publisher, is “a celebration of diversity and affirmation of individuality in animals and humans. . . . a fascinating discussion of diversity in gender and sexuality among fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals, including primates. [The book] explains how this diversity develops from the action of genes and hormones and how people come to differ from each other in all aspects of body and behavior.”

Roughgarden’s Coley Lecture will be entitled “Evolution’s Rainbow.”

The Andrea Carson Coley Lecture was endowed by a donation by Andrew and Kathy Coley in memory of their daughter (1972-93), who was a certificate candidate in Women’s Studies at UGA. This year’s lecture on Feb. 2 will be at 12:15 p.m. in Griffith Auditorium in the Georgia Museum of Art. A reception honoring the Coley family will precede the lecture at 11:30 a.m.

For more information on the lecture, contact Kristen Smith at 542-0066.

The annual Evolutionary Biology Symposium at UGA brings some of the country’s top experts to make presentations on the cutting edge of science. Roughgarden is the first of three speakers in this series.

Her evolutionary biology lecture on Feb. 1 will be in the ecology auditorium at 7:30 p.m. The title of her presentation is “Diversity, Gender and Sexuality: Conceptual Implications for Biology.”

Other symposium speakers will each deliver two talks, one on a Sunday at 7:30 p.m. in the ecology auditorium and one the following day at 11:15 a.m. in C127 life sciences building.

Linda Partridge, of University ­College, London, will speak Feb. 8 about “Diet, Death and Demography in Drosophila” and on Feb. 9 about “Mechanisms of Aging: Public or ­Private?’ Martin Wikelski of Princeton University will speak
Feb. 15 on “New Approaches to Old Questions: Why Biology Needs Field Ecology” and on Feb. 16 on “Understanding Organismal Design in Nature: The Physiology-Life History Connection.”