Big Biology

How can organismal choices drive adaptive evolution? Can plasticity act as a kind of selection?

In this episode, we talk with Pim Edelaar, a professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemical Engineering at the University Pablo de Olavide, Spain. He’s also the author of the new book The Selective Organism: An Expanded Theory of Adaptive Evolution. In the book, Pim proposes that in addition to natural selection there might be a “second driver” of adaptive evolution. We discuss the book with Pim, explore how non-genetic inheritance and plasticity underpin the theory, and talk about what implications this expanded perspective has for research. If after listening to the episode you’re interested in reading The Selective Organism, the digital version is free to download.

Cover art by Brianna Longo.

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How do you find an invasive species that no net can catch? What happens to the scientist whose research samples end up in federal court?

In this episode, we talk with David Lodge, a freshwater ecologist at Cornell University and past president of the Ecological Society of America. In 2009, David’s lab detected invasive carp from DNA in bottles of Illinois River water, including above the electric barrier meant to keep the carp out of the Great Lakes. That result helped found the field of environmental DNA, and it brought congressional testimony, a Supreme Court filing, and five hours of unfriendly questioning on the witness stand. Drawing on David’s recent retrospective in the journal Environmental DNA, we follow the science from a cup of water to the courtroom, visit the Wisconsin lakes where the invasive crayfish he has watched for more than forty years are now collapsing on their own, perhaps driven by a parasite new to science, and ask what it takes for science to inform policy without pretending to drive it.

Cover art by Brianna Longo.

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What was distinctive about Bob Ricklefs’ mentorship style, and how did he influence his students and collaborators? What were Bob’s major contributions to biology, and how did these ideas leave a lasting legacy on the field?

In this episode, we commemorate the life and work of Bob Ricklefs, who passed away recently. Bob was a giant in the fields of ecolo…

How have flowers shaped the modern world? Why do we and many other species have such intimate and long-term relationships with them?

On this special episode, we talk with David George Haskell, a writer and biologist. We discuss his most recent book, How Flowers Made our World, which explores the creative powers of flowering plants. Big Biology blogger and Biology PhD student, Clayton Glasgow, interviews David as an outreach project for the Young Voices of Science program. They discuss how flowers have played key roles in many ecosystems, the genomic innovations that underpinned the success of flowering plants, and the significant relationship between humans and flowers.

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When a bee visits a flower, what decides the match? How can a neutral model explain community assemblages? Why are long-term ecological studies so important?

In this episode, we talk with Diego Vázquez, a community ecologist at CONICET in Mendoza, Argentina, who has spent his career mapping the networks of interaction between plants and pollinators. Textbooks still teach coevolution as tight, faithful pairs, but Diego’s work tells a different story, that specialists mostly interact with generalists, and the best predictor of pollinator visits to plants turns out to be not matching traits or shared ancestry but abundance. Much of the structure ecologists prize in these networks can emerge from “neutral” models that know only who is common and when. We dig into why predicting these interactions remains hard, what his twenty-years of data on declining solitary bees is showing, and what it takes to keep long-term ecology alive in Argentina after deep cuts to science funding.

Cover art by Brianna Longo

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What have so many influential scientists been at some time been ridiculed and disbelieved by their peers or institutions? What reforms could foster bolder and more innovative science?

In this episode we talk with Matt Kaplan, a science correspondent at The Economist and author, about his most recent book I Told You So! Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exil…

How do hormones help animals cope with stress, seasons, and climate change? What is allostasis?

In this episode, our guest is John Wingfield, Emeritus Professor of Physiology and Behavior, at the University of California, Davis. John helped develop many fundamental hypotheses in the field of endocrinology through his work on wild bird populations, in particular the white-crowned sparrow. Fran Bonier, a former PhD student of John’s and now Professor of Biology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, also joined us for the chat.

We talk with John about how he got interested in understanding wildlife endocrinology, and discuss how he helped formulate the “challenge hypothesis”, “emergency life history hypothesis”, and the concept of “allostasis”. And at the end, John gives some advice to early career researchers, based on his experience as the head of the Biology Directorate at the National Science Foundation.

Cover art by Brianna Longo.

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How do you experimentally test theories of island biogeography? Who were the Tallahassee Mafia? Why do some introduced species become invasive and reshape ecosystems?

On this episode, we bring you a live recorded conversation we had with Daniel (Dan) Simberloff at the Laurel Theater in Knoxville, Tennessee. Dan Simberloff is the Nancy Gore Hunger Chair o…

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How is climate change affecting the movements of small predators in the sea? How do diatoms affect ocean carbon cycling? How do Cassiopea jellyfish act like ecosystem engineers?

On this episode, we bring you a live conversation from the recent University of South Florida Climate Teach-In where Marty interviewed his colleague, Associate Professor from the…

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What role do genes play in complex human behaviors? If behavior is largely shaped by a combination of experience and luck, how should we rethink blame, punishment, and forgiveness?

In this episode, we talk with Kathryn Paige Harden, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she leads the Developmental Behavior Genetics lab and…

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What are eco‑evolutionary dynamics and how can we study them in the wild? Why do some fish evolve placentas?

In this episode, we talk with David Reznick, Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of California, Riverside. David has spent much of his career studying Trinidadian guppies to understand adaptation in the wild. In our conversation, …

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How are camera traps used in the conservation of cryptic species such as the African golden cat? How can local communities be engaged to foster the success of conservation?

In this episode, we talk with Mwezi Mugerwa, winner of the2025 Indianapolis Prize Emerging Conservationist, a National Geographic Explorer, and President of the Society for Conservat…

How did life originate on Earth? Why is it that eukaryotes but not bacteria or archaea evolved large size and complicated body forms? How likely is that life has arisen independently elsewhere in the universe?

On this episode, we talk with Nick Lane, a biochemist and professor at University College London, about his 2015 book The Vital Question. Nick argues that protolife arose in alkaline hydrothermal vents deep in the early Earth’s oceans. The key early event was the evolution of metabolism powered by proton gradients. In other words, metabolism came first, and all of the rest of traits we think of as universal to life -- DNA, RNA, proteins, transcription, and translation -- came later. He also invokes an energetic perspective on the origin of eukaryotes, arguing that the acquisition of mitochondria distributed energy production through the cell volume, provided vastly more energy per gene, and allowed the dramatic expansion of eukaryotic genomes that in turn support the astonishing diversity of eukaryotic forms we see today.

This episode was originally aired in October 2020.

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How and when did humans domesticate the horse? How did horses shape our language, culture, and history?

On this episode, we talk with Dr. Ludovic Orlando, a research director for the French National Center for Scientific Research and founding director of the Centre for Anthropobiology & Genomics of Toulouse. Ludovic is also the author of the new book Hor…

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How do animals use medication and can humans learn from them? What are the evolutionary consequences of animal self-medication?

In this episode, we talk with Jaap de Roode, the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Biology at Emory University and author of the book Doctors by Nature: How Ants, Apes, and Other Animals Heal Themselves. Jaap’s research on monar…

What impact has the Trump administration had on biology and the scientific community? How do scientists study genomic adaptation and vulnerability?

On this episode we talk with Dr. Katie Lotterhos, Associate Professor in the Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences at Northeastern University. Katie is also the Secretary for the American Society of Naturalists, and she helped to coordinate and implement a survey of scientists to understand the impacts of the Trump administration’s policies on ecology, evolution, marine science and environmental science. In the first half of the episode, we talk with Katie about carrying out this survey, discuss some of the main themes of the results, and how the results can be used in the future. Then, we talk about Katie’s research where she uses oysters as a study system to understand the genomic basis of local adaptation and genomic vulnerability of populations to environmental change.

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What’s the value of risk-taking in research? How is studying the mechanisms of transgenerational inheritance in C. elegans unorthodox and insightful? How can AI help improve aspects of biology, namely the peer review process?

In this episode, we talk with Oded Rechavi, professor in the Faculty of Life Sciences and the Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel …

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How do non-adaptive processes shape biological diversity and complexity? What is effective population size and what important role does it play in evolution?

On this episode of Big Biology, we talk with Dr Mike Lynch, Regents Professor and the Director of the Biodesign Center for Mechanisms of Evolution at Arizona State University. We talk with Mike abou…

Where, when, and how did Homo sapiens appear? What do we know about the complex set of ancestral hominins that preceded us? How recently did other hominin lineages live and what happened to them?

On this episode, we talk with Kate Wong, a senior editor at Scientific American, about her article, The Origin of Us. Our understanding of hominin evolution over the past several million years has been transformed by exciting new fossil finds and new DNA sequence data. We talk with Kate about the biggest news, the luxuriant evolutionary bush from which our ancestors emerged in Africa, and her favorite fossil species.

Find more articles from Kate here: Stories by Kate Wong

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What can we learn from the COVID-19 pandemic, and how do we apply that knowledge moving forward?

On this special episode of Big Biology, we’re bringing you the highlights from a conference called “Covid Conversations,” which was hosted at the University of South Florida last December. The event brought together scientists, public health experts, medical doctors, historians, students, philosophers, and community leaders—for one big, open conversation about COVID-19. The episode shares the different perspectives these speakers had on the virus, the pandemic response, and our future preparedness to disease.

This episode is hosted by Caroline Merriman, a Big Biology intern and a research fellow with the Association of Public Health Laboratories program, and Kailey McCain, a PhD student in Marty’s lab at USF and a former Big Biology intern.

Cover art by Keating Shahmehri

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