We’re only a few hours away from the start of Darwin/Chicago 2009, 2+ days of the world’s leading evolutionary biologists discussing the past and future of the field. Come back to this space tonight at 6:00 pm Central time for live-blog coverage of the opening event at Rockefeller Chapel, and keep coming back all day Friday and Saturday for frequent updates from the conference.

Before things get into full swing, I wanted to play armchair Linnaeus and organize the conference’s 30-some talks into a few major themes. So much is packed into Friday and Saturday, with two simultaneous programs covering “biological sciences” and “history and philosophy,” I won’t be able to see everything, but the list also contains what I’m hoping to prioritize in order to get at least a representative sample of the event.

Evolution Goes to Church

Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, the looming gothic structure on the southeast side of campus where convocations and communion services are held, has been the site of Darwin discussion before - as mentioned yesterday, Sir Julian Huxley gave a speech predicting the end of religion at the 1959 conference. Thursday night’s trio of speakers both follows that agnostic tradition and nicely previews the main threads of the more tightly-packed Friday and Saturday schedules.

Addressing the renewed vigor of the evolution vs. religion debate, Ronald Numbers of the University of Wisconsin will recap the historic path of these conflicts, emphasizing that the “young earth” element of today’s creationists is a relatively new development. Harvard’s Marc Hauser, meanwhile, will pull the rug out from under one of the main creationist arguments - that morality could not have developed under natural selection and must have been given to humans by a supernatural power. But lest you think evolutionary biologists are too distracted by the external debate to do the hard work in their own field, legendary geneticist Richard Lewontin will open the night’s proceedings talking about the challenges of directly determining how genes contribute to an organism’s fitness.

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Sir Julian Huxley speaks in Rockefeller Chapel, 1959

As discussed yesterday, the Darwin/Chicago 2009 conference marks not just the anniversary of Darwin’s birth and most famous book (The Origin of Species) but also 50 years since a landmark evolution conference was held at the University of Chicago. Like this year’s gathering, the 1959 conference was meant to both look back at Darwin’s life and ideas and look forward to the future of the field his theory created: evolutionary biology.

To commemorate this historic conference, the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library has put together a great web exhibit with video and audio from the Darwin Centennial conference in 1959. Encylopedia Brittanica Films produced a film of the conference, and you can watch several video clips from that film and listen to audio excerpts from three presentations - in addition to songs from the Darwin musical commissioned for the meeting.

From the film footage available on the website, you can see that the style of the conference in 1959 was very different from what will occur this weekend. Instead of individual talks and Powerpoints, the scientists participated in panel discussions on topics such as The Origin of Life and Man as an Organism - the latter of which was held on Thanksgiving Day. One clip shows overflow crowds that couldn’t get into Mandel Hall (where the panels were held) sitting in other University buildings and staring off into space as they listen to the audio of the conference. This weekend’’s overflow crowd will be able to stare at their computer and follow along right here on the blog, if you’ll forgive the plug.

Then again, some things weren’t so different between 1959 and 2009. Tension between evolution and religion was intact: Sir Julian Huxley, the renowned zoologist considered to be one of the main architects of the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology, gave a lecture in Rockefeller Chapel entitled The Evolutionary Vision which, according to Regenstein librarian David Pavelich, “proposed that religion, being subject to the laws of evolution, was fast becoming obsolete and would eventually evolve itself out of existence.” The religious opposition to Darwin’s theories was acknowledged by University of Chicago chancellor and professor of philosophy Lawrence Kimpton, who likened Darwin to John Stuart Mill as advocates of free thought and liberty:

“Darwin, in his own sphere and his own action, produced an independent defiance of the pressures of his day, challenging the rigidity of thought and temper with a naturalistic theory shocking to the entrenched supernatural explanation of biology. The outrage and the distortions that erupted immediately, persisting well into this century and even in this country, are measures of Darwin’s independence.”

Also in audio clips:

• Sir Charles Galton Darwin discussing his grandfather’s legendary voyage observing and collecting specimens on the H.M.S. Beagle, including a reading of what Darwin wrote in his journal the first time he ate a banana.
• Archaeologist Louis Leakey on the search for fossils of human ancestors - “You hear people say ‘what has Africa created to the human race?’ It contributed the human race.”

In lighter fare, check out the songs from the Darwin musical, Time Will Tell, premiered at the conference. They are very 1959, and are probably the only songs you will ever hear with lyrics such as “this gastropod has quite an odd phylogeny” and “Alas, to his sorrow, he generally finds/That pre-conceived notions of various kinds/Have already helped them to make up their minds/And the facts will only confuse them.” I could see that as the theme song for quite a few evolution blogs, actually.

There has certainly been no shortage of attention on Charles Darwin this year. With the dual landmarks of Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species, virtually every scientific publication, museum, conference and institution has taken the opportunity to pay tribute to the life and work of the man who gave us the theory of evolution. But now that the celebrations are (mostly) over, it’s time for the field of evolutionary biology to move forward, capitalizing on new technologies and discoveries that were only a dream when Darwin drew upon decades of observation and thought to craft his revolutionary book.

That same challenge faced evolutionary biologists in 1959, when they gathered at the University of Chicago to observe the 150th and 100th birthdays of Darwin and his book. Brought together were many of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers on the subject of evolution, including legendary biologists Julian Huxley, Theodosius Dobzhansky, and Ernst Mayr, Darwin’s grandson Charles Galton Darwin, and John Scopes of Scopes Monkey Trial fame. And according to Robert Richards, professor of the history of science and medicine at the University of Chicago, the discussions that took place at that conference helped solidify what we now think of as the “modern synthesis” of evolutionary theory, the merging of Darwin’s ideas about the gradual effects of natural selection with the then-new field of genetics.

Darwin/Chicago 2009, which begins Thursday night at the University of Chicago, will try to recapture that spirit and make a similar impact upon the path of evolutionary biology. Once again bringing the field’s brightest lights to Hyde Park for an exchange of ideas, Richards and the conference’s other organizers hope that the event will do more than merely acknowledge a triple anniversary, but will instead re-evaluate evolution science in light of a world much different from the 19th century environment that shaped Darwin’s thoughts. Here, with Richards’ assistance, are three reasons why now is a great time to talk about Charles Darwin and evolution.

1) New technologies

The 1959 conference took place only six years after James D. Watson and Francis Crick published their landmark paper on the double-helix structure of DNA. And it wasn’t until 1957 that the “central dogma” of biology - that DNA encodes for RNA which encodes for proteins - was enunciated by Crick. So the ‘59 conference took place at the dawning of the genetic age, when the biological substrate that Darwin’s natural selection acts upon was finally understood.

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And so Neuroscience 2009 comes to an end, and it’s time to put away my badge, rest my weary feet and note-taking hand and think about biology below the neck again. Here’s the final installment of our live coverage, but come back tomorrow for a roundup of the conference with highlights, loose observations and links to other people’s thoughts on the conference. Thanks for reading!

2:30 PM - The Final Talk

The schedule may say that Neuroscience 2009 runs through the end of the day today, but judging by how many suitcase-toting scientists were jumping in airport cabs this afternoon, a small portion of the 30,000+ attendance makes it to the very end. Indeed, even the main stage ends its conference early, shutting down after a talk by Mt. Sinai School of Medicine’s Eric Nestler, an expert in the field of molecular psychiatry.

Nestler’s research focuses on the gritty details of how drugs of abuse change the expression of a person’s genes - yes, it was another addiction talk, and the former addiction researcher that I am, it was great to see the topic getting so much attention this year. In the addiction press conference I attended yesterday, Nestler hinted at a bombshell idea - frequent users of addictive drugs such as cocaine, heroin or alcohol may change the mechanics of their genes so permanently, the modifications could be passed on to their children. This “inheritable addiction” has already been observed in lab rats, Nestler said, mirroring similar results seen with the offspring of obese rats (which I talked about on Monday).

But that data must be too fresh for mass consumption, despite Nestler telling a roomful of reporters about it the day before. His talk today focused on the steps leading up to that discovery, carefully examining how repeated cocaine increases or decreases the activity of hundreds of genes in the reward pathway of the brain. Those long-lasting changes, which can cause cells of the reward pathway to actually grow and change shape, help explain why addiction is such a difficult condition to treat - it may require a complete re-re-structuring of the brain.

Much of the addiction research I’ve talked about this week has taken place in animals, but before Nestler’s talk, I came across a rare experiment that looks at the behavioral effects of a commonly-used drug in humans. It might seem strange that we know a ton about the specific genes that are up or down-regulated by cocaine, but not so much about its effects upon humans, but that’s due to procedural reasons - it’s quite hard to get approval for a study that gives illegal drugs to humans.

Michael Ballard, from the University of Chicago laboratory of Harriet DeWit, was trying to fill in at least one of those gaps in the research by testing the effects of THC (the active ingredient in marijuana) to presumably eager volunteers. Ballard then tested the subjects’ ability to judge facial expressions and determine the emotional content of pictures and personality trait words while they were under the influence of the drug. Interestingly, higher doses of THC caused the subjects to misjudge the facial expressions they were shown, suggesting an effect of the drug on social perception. The other tests were normal during the drug effect, but when brought back to the laboratory a week later, the subjects showed a decreased ability to remember neutral and negative personality traits, possibly indicating that their memories of the drug effect were biased toward happier stimuli. Ballard hopes to continue that research into other drug types - he’s currently testing amphetamine - to give the field of addiction research much-needed, laboratory-controlled human data to make sense of the flood of animal experiments.

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Whenever I see a drawing of Tiktaalik like the one above, I always think “Man, that walking fish sure looks snooty.” But Tiktaalik roseae, discovered in 2004 by University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin and his team in the Canadian Arctic, is worthy of its haughty air. For one thing, the “fishapod” had a neck, a feature you don’t typically find on a fish, and the explanation for its stuck-up posture. Tiktaalik’s limbs were even more unusual and exciting, as Shubin found bones that were more like fingers than the tiny bones typically seen in fish fins. These structures meant Tiktaalik held a very important place in the tree of life, one of the elusive transitional species (in this case between fish and amphibians) that evolutionary biologists dream of discovering.

Shubin’s book about Tiktaalik and how it demonstrates the process of evolution, Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, was released almost two years ago. Perhaps it takes scientists a while to squeeze in some non-journal reading time, because the book (now in paperback, cough plug cough) was today named as the 2009 book of the year by the National Academy of Sciences. Here’s what they said:

Neil Shubin for his delightful, intellectually challenging view of evolution from primitive fish to humans by a scientist who finds fossils in the most uncomfortable places and chronicles it all in Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (Pantheon Books).

Your Inner Fish was also on the shortlist for this year’s Royal Society Prize for Science Books, in the esteemed company of science writers such as Carl Zimmer, Leonard Mlodinow and Ben Goldacre.

UPDATE: You can read an online excerpt from Your Inner Fish, thanks to University of Chicago Magazine!

Shubin is as good a public speaker as he is a writer. As probably the only fish paleontologist who teaches anatomy to medical students (here at the Pritzker School of Medicine), Shubin uses evolutionary theory to explain the stranger features of the human body. I caught an excellent lecture from him at the AAAS Meeting this past February (my favorite quote: “When I look at a human being, what I see is a giant, morphed-up fish.”), and he came off like a seasoned television pro on the Colbert Report. If you’d like to see Shubin live and in person, he is one of several speakers at the star-studded Darwin Conference taking place October 29-31 at the University of Chicago to celebrate the 150th anniversary of The Origin of the Species.

For a little teaser, here’s some video taken by Jeremy Manier earlier this year of Shubin talking about how cartoons and toys mischaracterize the process of evolution.

Neil Shubin is far more than a renowned evolutionary biologist - he’s actually been on the Colbert Report. That gives him a special kind of authority that’s hard to get merely from uncovering an historic missing link between fish and land animals. Neil said Colbert tells his guests to think of him in simple terms. “I play an idiot,” Colbert tells them. “I will be willfully ignorant of everything you say. Just ignore me, let me make the jokes, and you be as smart as you can be.”

At least I think Neil told me that story. Maybe it was Kenneth Miller, another evolutionary biologist I know who’s been on Colbert’s show. Colbert’s character seems inexorably drawn toward talented evolutionary scholars. Is no articulate biologist safe from this man? Someone warn Richard Dawkins - oh, wait. Better watch your backs, Sean Carroll and Jerry Coyne.

[UPDATE]: Apparently Colbert just recently had on Denis Dutton, who tries to explain art via evolution. I think that counts, too.

While we ponder why Colbert has such a jones for evolution, here’s Neil talking about what Darwin got wrong - and the big picture that he got profoundly right.

And here’s Colbert’s interview with Neil from last year. Granted, my video looks a bit low-end by comparison. But then I didn’t ask the question, ”What is it about evolutionary biologists that they just can’t let people think what they want about themselves?’

I sat down yesterday with Robert Richards, author of “The Meaning of Evolution,” to talk about Darwin’s cultural influences and his place in history. Richards gave a very nice explanation of how deeply Darwin was influenced by John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”

When [Darwin] was on The Beagle, he carried Milton’s “Paradise Lost” with him everywhere. He read the poem incessantly. And of course it’s the story of death and suffering - man’s fall. But man’s fall is a necessary prerequisite for the coming of the savior, and the production of life more abundantly, a new kind of life. And if you read those last paragraphs [in "The Origin of Species"], it looks as though Darwin is trying to justify suffering and death. How do you do it? Death and suffering are justified because of the production of the higher animals, life more abundantly. A life leading to the production of the highest animal, namely us, with our moral sentiments.

Darwin’s theory has been so successful that we sometimes overlook the extent to which it was a product of his time, and his distinct way of seeing the world. This link to “Paradise Lost” casts the evolutionary process as something tragic, yet containing the seed of great beauty.

One of the interesting riddles of evolution is how single-celled organisms became integrated into larger communities of cells, finally resulting in cumbersome creatures like us. But sometimes even we get glimpses of what life before the multi-cellular era might have looked like.

When cancer develops, the affected cells abandon the body’s well-regulated union and revert to form as freelancers. They become single cells with ravenous needs. Genetic mutations make those cells ditch polite conventions, like having the courtesy to self-destruct when they collect too many harmful changes. Immortal and more prolific than the surrounding cells, they gain an advantage and start undermining the body’s essential functions.

Here’s Dr. Ezra Cohen, a specialist in head and neck cancer here, explaining how Darwinian principles aid the study of cancer.

This blog will cover a lot of research that happens beyond the walls of this university, but with some of the world’s leading authorities on Darwin and evolutionary biology just a short walk away, I wanted to collect some of their thoughts about Darwin Day.

Here’s Neil Shubin, bestselling author of “Your Inner Fish” and leader of a team that made one of the great paleontological finds in recent history - Tiktaalik roseae, also called the ”fishapod.” Neil keeps a funny little Darwin toy in his office that he uses to explain a central misconception about evolution - the idea that evolution always progresses toward ever greater complexity.

By a happy coincidence, we chose the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth to start this new biomedical blog, Science Life. Evolution and human genetics will be frequent subjects here, both in terms of theory and clinical applications. Later today I’ll post some interviews about how Darwin struggled with his own theory, and how Darwinian principles continue to shape modern biology and medicine, including the study of cancer.

First, here’s a cartoon from the turn of the 20th Century (courtesy of University of Chicago Darwin scholar Robert Richards), confirming that Hyde Park has always been a great place to think about Darwin’s ideas.