The development of multicellular organisms involves a delicate interplay between genetic and environmental influences.

It is often useful to think of developmental systems as integrating available sources of information about current conditions to produce organisms. Genes and inherited physiology provide cues, as does the state of the environment during development.

The integration systems themselves are under genetic control, and subject to Darwinian selection, so we expect them to evolve to produce organisms that fit well with current ecological (including social) conditions.

I argue for the scientific value of this explicitly informational perspective by providing detailed examples of how it can elucidate taxonomically diverse phenomena.

I also present a general framework for linking genetic and phenotypic variation from an informational perspective. This application of Darwinian logic at the organismal level can elucidate genetic influences on phenotypic variation in novel and counterintuitive ways.

Biography

The primary aim of my research is to explore how animals cope with the unexpected opportunities and dangers they face in their day-to-day lives.

To this end, I study how animals collect and provide information to reduce uncertainty about significant events, or how they insure against it, along with evolutionary and ecological consequences of such risk management. Research in my group ranges from the development of explicit theoretical (mathematical and computational) models, through work on captive birds in aviaries (zebra finches, starlings) to work in the field with birds (pied flycatchers, barn swallows, red grouse, European shags, chestnut-crowned babblers) and mammals (badgers, lions, wolves, grey squirrels).

I am also a (senior) Editor for Proceedings of the Royal Society of London - Biological Sciences.

This seminar is part of the Evolution, Ecology and Genetics Seminar Series