Hi, Welcome to the first edition of PopGen radio, your dedicated population genetics podcast. I'm your host, Philipp Wesche, and I'm a final year PhD student at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Edinburgh, and this podcast is about population genetics and evolutionary biology, the science and the community. In tonight's programme I'll be reporting back from recent conferences in Bordeaux and Krakov, and talk about Conrad Waddington on occasion of the centenary of his birth. I'll be giving a quick listing of upcoming conferences up until December, and close with inviting your suggestions for future programmes. This programme will last approximately 10 minutes. When I started scripting this episode, I'd just come back from the 11th PhD students of evolutionary biology meeting in Bordeaux. The meeting took five days, and included short talks by the over 100 student participants and keynotes by the invited experts. The invited experts were Lounes Chikhi, who gave a survey of population genetic inference methods and software Olivier Tenaillon talking about cooperation and cheating in experimental microcosms, Guillaume Lecointre talking about phylogenetic analysis of multiple datasets, Marc-Andre Selosse talking about mycorrhizal networks and symbiosis Gabriel Marais gave his talk on evolution of sex chromosomes, and his round table on the evolution of flower and leaf development Patrice David gave a round table on the heritability of fitness and correlated traits, and the question of how diversity might be maintained in such traits. Jean-Sebastien Pierre's behavioural ecology talked about the marginal value theorem vs. incremental and decremental models of motivation Adam Eyre-Walker talking about rates of evolution and fitness effects of mutations. So thanks to them. On the student side, I enjoyed Kristjan Niitepold's talk in which he related flight metabolism of butterflies to dispersal and metapopulation dynamics; also a talk by Jacob Johansson about evolution of food webs. There was a poster on the evolution of recombination in a two-dimensional population by Marcel Salathé and others, if I remember correctly making the case for more efficient removal of deleterious mutations which are initially only locally segregating and hence producing quite a few homozygotes. It was interesting to note how the talks ended up being mostly grouped by country in the programme simply because different countries have different research foci or perhaps because certain symposium titles sound more trendy in the given culture. The organisation for next year is now being discussed between Scotland and Russia - hopefully there will be an update on this soon. Any of you that may be interested in attending next year, there are photo albums available from the last two years, and I'll put the urls on the podcast web page. Before Bordeaux, there was Krakov: 1100 participants went to ESEB this summer, which led to some anoxic conditions and the need to have the plenary talks in a large cinema at 8 in the morning, to leave time for the bus transfer to the main location. As a first time attendee, I found it unfortunate that invited speakers were given longer slots than normal speakers, necessitating a schedule in which most of the talks given by the big names clashed. As people seem to tendentially progress from empirical work early in their lives to theoretical work later, this meant that a lot of the theory talks clashed. In any case, Krakov had an amazing atmosphere, is a beautiful city, and from a UK perspective, not too far from Prague, where some people travelled on to. These days, we are celebrating the centenary of Conrad Hal Waddington's birth - especially in Edinburgh, where he spent much of his career. Apart from formulating the concept of an epigenetic landscape, in allusion to Sewall Wright's fitness landscape - and both landscapes seem to share the same initial appeal and eventual difficulties - Wad, as he was later known, coined concepts such as canalisation, that are still much used in population genetics. What may be less well known is that he attempted to recover Lamarck's reputation by means of studies of the veinless phenotype in flies - which can be genetic or induced by high temperatures. Wad felt that Lamarck had been unjustly treated - and I wonder if we will come to regard acquired, inherited characters as a special subset of maternal effects, namely those where the relevant mother's and offspring's trait are the same trait. What is most amazing about Waddington when one reads these articles is the extent to which he inspired others to do interesting work and persevere in science. I've no doubt that this exceeds his already impressive direct contribution to science. It seems that wherever he went, and true to his Quaker upbringing and left-wing political leanings, through simply good practice and mannerful conduct he effortlessly and perhaps almost inadvertently recruited people into science and his own specific endeavours and interests. For some time, there were five Fellows of the Royal Society in Biology in Edinburgh besides himself - of course, all of them on their own merit, but I imagine that the fact that they were in Edinburgh at all was due in no small part to Waddington's accepting the position offered to him here. Waddington was a polymath. He edited a journal of poetry in Cambridge, and later published a book on visual art. The second most amazing quality of his was the way he would start something up and then move on, always keeping the broader picture. His last major interests were in "the man-made future", the name of a lecture course he taught during a brief period spent at Buffalo, New York State, and a book, "Tools for thought", which unfortunately I have not read and only been able to find brief comments on, but it sounds like a companion title to Limits to growth, the to date most influential publication of the Club of Rome, of which Wad was a founding member. He has also been identified as the main mover in starting the journal Genetical Research, something that's close to the heart for many of us, I'm sure, and has been one of those people that are not scared to don a suit to further the interests of the community, and so he did what he had done to Edinburgh on an international scale, and served as president of the International Union of Biological Sciences when the International Biological Programme was being conceived, very much shaped by Waddington's own and admirably unbiased vision. To close, I can highly recommend the Biographical Memoir written by Alan Robertson and published by the Royal Society, as well as a shorter article by Jonathan Slack, which appeared in Nature Reviews Genetics. There may be another such article in the pipeline from Jonathan Bard, based on a lecture he recently gave here. All of these conferences are listed on evoldir if not explicitly stated otherwise. On Tuesday the 11th of October, a one day meeting entitled Understanding Human Altruism, organised by Joel Peck at the University of Sussex On the 20th of October, there's a graduate-student-organised conference on the developmental basis of evolutionary change at the university of chicago with keynotes by Peter Holland and Naomi Pierce and on the 21st of October, we'll have the Young Bioinformaticians' Forum in london. this one has not been announced on EvolDir, but you can visit ybf.org. On the 4th of November, Kansas City plays host to a symposium on ecological genomics, with speakers such as Toby Bradshaw and Trudy Mackay On the 5th of November, the 16th New England Molecular Evolutionary Biologists Meeting will take place at Wellesley College, but I can't reach the website to find out more details at the moment. On the 9th, there's a speciation symposium organised by Roger Butlin and Ralph Harbach at the Natural History Museum in London. From November 17th to 19th, the 5th Georgia Tech ORNL international conference on bioinformatics and in silico biology takes places in Atlanta. PopGroup has now been confirmed for December 13th to 16th, that's a Tuesday to Friday, and will take place at Heriot-Watt University here in Edinburgh. Finally, I've been thinking about what future programmes should cover and what the format should be, and I've put a list of ideas on the web page for this programme, but I'm happy to hear entirely new ones, so do email me and give me any other comments as well; the address is [censored] So let me know what you think, thanks for listening and I hope to have you back for the next show.