Conservation Lecture Series Program

Lecture by Dr. Gavin Naylor, PhD, University of Florida at 7-8 pm with light refreshments and conversation with the speaker after the lecture.  Free and open to the public.

Darwin’s idea that the diversity of life arose by descent with modification required two elements. (1) a means of generating heritable traits. (2) a means to select among the traits so generated. His theory of Natural Selection accounted for the second component. But he was never able to explain how novel heritable traits arose in the first place. We still don’t have a general theory to account for the generation of novel heritable traits. Dr. Naylor will make the case that there has been too much emphasis on the importance of natural selection to explain the diversity of life – and not enough on the intrinsic properties of the living systems themselves.