Davis, California
August 27, 2008
Evolutionary biologist and author
Jared Diamond will present the opening keynote address for an
international symposium on agricultural biodiversity, to be held
Sept. 14-18 at the University
of California, Davis.
The Harlan II
International Symposium, the successor to a program held 11
years ago in Syria, is dedicated to the late crop evolutionist
Jack R. Harlan. It will focus on the importance of using and
conserving not just a diversity of species, but also genetic
diversity within species.
In opening the symposium, Diamond will discuss whether
environmental factors, rather than pure chance, led to the
uneven distribution around the world of plant and animal species
suitable for domestication and agricultural use. His public
presentation on Sunday, Sept. 14, will begin at 6:15 p.m. in 123
Science Lecture Hall at UC Davis. Admission to the talk and the
preceding reception will cost $50 per person.
Diamond maintains that the adoption of agriculture was "the most
important event in the last 50,000 years of human history." As
people developed the ability to cultivate crops and raise
animals, they were able to produce a surplus of food, which
fueled population growth and led to settled living, technology,
social stratification and political centralization, he notes.
He points out that the societies with the greatest variety of
plant species suitable for farming expanded earlier and farther
than did societies in areas with the fewest farmable plant
species -- and no animal species -- that were easily
domesticated. For example, cultures in the Fertile Crescent,
China, the Andes, and Meso-America
-- the land between central Mexico and Nicaragua -- flourished,
while cultures in areas such as Eastern North America and
Highland New Guinea did not.
Diamond will question whether environmental factors in different
regions predisposed wild animal and plant species in those areas
to develop traits conducive to domestication.
A complete program for the Harlan II symposium is available
online
at: <http://harlanii.ucdavis.edu/main/speakers_topics.htm>.
For fee information and a list of talks and tours, click on
"registration" at the left of this page.
Among the speakers during the three-day symposium will be:
Monday, Sept. 15, 9
a.m. -- Robert Wayne, a UCLA biology professor and expert on
canine genetics, will discuss what the analysis of the dog
genome -- the entire collection of genes for the animal
family that includes domestic dogs, wolves, foxes and
coyotes -- tells about the evolutionary history of these
animals and how the various species are related.
Monday, Sept. 15, 1:30 p.m. -- Doyle McKey, Universite de
Montpellier II and the Center of Evolutionary and Functional
Ecology, Montpellier, France, will discuss ecological
approaches to crop domestication, using manioc, or cassava,
as an example of how ecology can be integrated with genetics
and ethnobiology -- the study of how people interact with
the living environment -- to test plant-domestication
scenarios.
Tuesday, Sept. 16, 9:30 a.m. -- Anthropologist
Melinda Zeder, director of the archaeobiology program for
the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, will
discuss her latest research on when and where in the world
animals were first domesticated.
Tuesday, Sept. 16, 6 p.m. -- Keynote speaker Gary Nabhan, an
ecologist and pioneer in the local-food movement from the
Southwest Center of the University of Arizona, will compare
the crop diversity found by plant explorer N.I. Vavilov
between 1916 and 1936, with the remaining diversity that
Nabhan found in the same areas in nine countries on five
continents three quarters of a century later.
Nabhan says that an understanding of how biodiversity in
local agricultural systems has changed may help predict how
well farmers may be able to adapt to rapid climate change,
globalization, water scarcity, and weed or pest invasions.
Wednesday, Sept. 17, 8 a.m. -- M. Kat Andersen, a
plant ecologist in UC Davis' Department of Plant Sciences
and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources
Conservation Service, will discuss how Native Californians
cultivated naturally occurring plants as sources of food
even before the first Europeans arrived and how some of
those practices are being applied in certain sectors of
modern agriculture today.
Wednesday, Sept. 17, 9 a.m. -- Dennis Hedgecock, a fisheries
ecologist at the University of Southern California, will
discuss the importance of conserving genetic resources in
aquaculture, which he says is now the fastest-growing sector
of global food production. He will discuss the challenges in
both conserving and utilizing the planet's imperiled aquatic
biodiversity, when faced with the threat of overfishing,
species introductions, interactions of wild and farmed
stocks, ocean warming and ocean acidification.
Wednesday, Sept. 17, 11 a.m. -- Charles Bamforth, the
Anheuser-Busch Endowed Professor of Brewing Science at UC
Davis, will discuss genetic resources of brewing yeast,
which he says is the best example of the major advances that
have been made in just a few decades in understanding the
physiology, biochemistry and genetics of yeasts and other
microorganisms.
Wednesday, Sept. 17, 11:30 a.m., -- James Lapsley, adjunct
associate professor in the Department of Viticulture and
Enology and chair of the Department of Science, Agriculture,
and Natural Resources in UC Davis Extension, will talk about
the introduction to California of Vitis vinifera, the grape
species that includes most traditional European wine grapes.
Lapsley is author of the book "Bottled Poetry," a history of
California winemaking.
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