It's odd to be on this island that evokes images of Darwin and to hear talks in which 21st century genomics intersects 19th century ideas about naturalselection and evolution. For this reason, Mary Jane West-Eberhard of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, chair of the unnamed afternoon session, dubbed it ?Interesting New Fields That Charles Darwin Might Have Liked? - rather than the buzzwordy evo-devo.One talk that Darwin would have liked, from Ken Wolfe of Trinity College in Dublin, superimposed genetic and genomic data on a phylogenetic tree of the fungi, weaving a tale of genome duplication and subsequent gene loss that paralleled speciation in the kingdom. It was an exciting foreshadowing for plant and animal evolutionary biology. ?Our knowledge of genome evolution in fungi is many years ahead of animals or plants. We have 25 genome sequences from fungi; it will be 2 to 3 years before we...
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