Each winter, Director William (Ned) Friedman and the Arnold Arboretum present the Director’s Lecture Series, featuring nationally recognized experts addressing an array of topics related to Earth’s biodiversity and evolutionary history, the environment, conservation biology, and key social issues associated with current science. The Director’s Lecture Series is open to current Arnold Arboretum members only; visit http://arboretum.harvard.edu for information on becoming a member. Lectures take place in the Hunnewell Building Lecture Hall. Parking will be available along the Arborway and in front of the Hunnewell Building on lecture nights.
This year’s series begins Monday, January 22 at 7 pm, with the Director himself speaking on Replaying Life’s Tape Through the Lens of Plants. What can an understanding of the history of photosynthetic life tell us of the human condition? Are we, as a cognitive species, an absolutely inevitable consequence of several billion years of evolution? Or, should we wake up every morning with an exhilarating sense of the sheer improbability of just being! For decades, going back to the book Wonderful Life, by Stephen J. Gould, the debate as to the probabilities of intelligent life evolving not only here on Earth, but throughout the universe, has ebbed and flowed. None of the chief protagonists in this debate (zoologists, microbiologists, or philosophers) has ever thought about how an understanding of plant evolutionary history might bear heavily on the conclusions one reaches. Professor Friedman will discuss how just a few tweaks to the evolutionary history of plants might ultimately have precluded human life from evolving on Earth – and whether such tweaks could occur upon replaying life’s tape.
Register online at https://www.arboretum.harvard.edu/news-events/directors-lecture-series/
