Presented By: The Center for the Study of Complex Systems
Disentangling Darwin’s Tangled Bank in the Lab and on the Computer
Luis Zaman, NSF Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Biology, University of Washington-Seattle
Living systems are embedded within complex ecological networks where adaptations in one species have resounding effects on fitness for the rest. Charles Darwin highlighted this dependence by inviting his reader to imagine a “tangled bank,” chocked full of interacting plants and animals. How then does evolution proceed in such a tangled bank? In the first part of my talk I will discuss how host-parasite coevolution in populations of self-replicating computer programs shapes what is adaptive for the hosts and ultimately drives the evolution of biological complexity. I will show how we can use these evolving digital communities to study how networks of host-parasite interactions are formed in more detail than is currently possible in the lab or in nature. Finally, I will discuss a new method of growing microbes in millions of easy-to-create droplets of media isolated by an oil phase. These emulsions allow us to test how competition for shared resources (i.e., intraspecific interactions) affects the evolutionary trajectory a population takes, and how that trajectory aligns with our predictions. Together, these projects harness technology, including computational simulations and novel culturing methods for microbes, to address fundamental questions about evolution in dynamic and entangled contexts.
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