Monday, October 30, Gzang 131, 4:00-5.00 pm, Refreshments 3:40pm
When Darwin first proposed his theory of evolution by natural selection, he realized that it had a problem explaining the origins of traits of "extreme perfection and complication" such as the vertebrate eye. Over the years, critics of Darwin's theory have latched onto this perceived flaw as proof that Darwinian evolution is impossible. In anticipation of this issue, Darwin described the perfect data needed to understanding this process, but lamented that such data are "scarcely ever possible" to obtain. In this talk, I will discuss research where we use digital organisms (populations of self-replicating and evolving computer programs) to elucidate the process by which new, highly-complex traits arise, drawing inspiration directly from Darwin's wistful thinking and hypotheses. I will also explore some of the implications of this research to other aspects of evolutionary biology and new ways that these evolutionary principles can be applied toward solving computational problems.
bio:Dr. Charles Ofria is an assistant professor at Michigan State University in the Computer Science Department and the Ecology, Evolutionary Biology, and Behavior Program. He has a heavily multidisciplinary background, receiving a PhD in the Computation and Neural Systems department at Caltech under physicist Chris Adami, then doing a postdoc for three years in the Microbial Ecology program at MSU under biologist Richard Lenski. He is now the director of the MSU Digital Evolution Lab, a multidisciplinary group using digital organisms to answer fundamental questions in evolutionary biology and harnessing the results to solve more applied problems. Please see http://devolab.cse.msu.edu/ for more information.
Sponsored by Computer Science and Volen Center for Complex Systems