Society of Systematic Biologists

The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) would like to announce our call for proposals effective August 15, 2005, for Postdoctoral Fellows, Sabbatarians, Catalysis Groups and Working Groups. We hope to fund 7 postdocs, 5 sabbatarians, and 6 groups. The deadline for proposals is October 15, 2005. Please see complete details on our website: http://www.nescent.org.

The June 2005 issue is now online.

Books reviewed in this issue (available from Amazon.com)

The ISI Journal Citation Reports that Systematic Biology had an impact factor of 10.257 for the year 2004, up from 7.740 in 2003. I think this reflects very well on the work my predecessor Chris Simon and her Associate Editors put in to the journal. In the Evolutionary Biology category, Systematic Biology is second only to the review journal TREE. Hence, we have the largest impact factor of any research journal in evolutionary biology.

The Tree Thinking Group is a loose association of people , including researchers, teachers and students, who are interested in teaching and learning evolutionary biology effectively. There are, of course, many groups that are interested in improving evolution education and you can find out about some of them on our resource pages. What makes this effort stand out somewhat is our focus on tree thinking â�" that is, the use of a phylogenetic perspective for making sense of biology.

Visit the web site at www.tree-thinking.org.

The 52nd Annual Systematics Symposium "Reconstructing Complex Evolutionary Histories: Gene-Species Trees, Historical Biogeography, and Coevolutions" will be held from 7-9 October 2005 at the Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Registration forms are available from our web site. For more information, please contact the Symposium Organizer: Mick Richardson, Missouri Botanical Garden, P.O. Box 299, St. Louis, MO 63166-0299, U.S.A. Tel.: +1 (314) 577 5176, Fax: +1 (314) 577 0820, e-mail mick.richardson@mobot.org.

Phylogenetic supertrees:Combining information to reveal the Tree of Life
edited by Olaf Bininda-Emonds

This is the first book on "phylogenetic supertrees", a recent, but controversial development for inferring evolutionary trees. Rather than analyze the combined primary character data directly, supertree construction proceeds by combining the tree topologies derived from those data. This difference in strategy has allowed for the exciting possibility of larger, more complete phylogenies than are otherwise currently possible, with the potential to revolutionize evolutionarily-based research.

This provocatively entitled paper by Bapteste et al. has just been published in BMC Evolutionary Biology.

The authors conclude:

Our phylogenetic analyses do not support tree-thinking. These results have important conceptual and practical implications. We argue that representations other than a tree should be investigated in this case because a non-critical concatenation of markers could be highly misleading.

New Zealand's Bioinformatics Institute* has launched the first online, open-access journal dedicated to evolutionary bioinformatics -- Evolutionary Bioinformatics Online. There is growing awareness that to understand organismal form and function, through the use of molecular, genetic, genomic, and proteomic data, due consideration must be given to an organism's evolutionary context: history constrains the path an organism is obliged to take, and leaves an indelible mark on its component parts. The journal has an editorial board of leading international researchers, led by Editor-in-Chief Prof. Mark Pagel of Reading University.

Pablo Goloboff has been awarded the $US 35,000 Ebbe Nielsen Prize by GBIF.

This Prize is the only award in the world for excellence in biodiversity informatics, the area of science that develops computer programs and uses the Internet in support of research on the range and spread of life on earth.

Read more on the GBIF site.

Find papers in Systematic Biology by Pablo
Goloboff.
Search Google Scholar for papers by Pablo Goloboff.

Everyone who receives an SSB award must fill out the proper paperwork to get a check.

To facilitate this process, we have created a flow chart that shows the requirements for getting your award monies to you or your institution.

By far the easiest route to getting your money is if we can issue your award to an Academic Institution (no paperwork!). If your institution is not able to receive this award for you, then please follow the instructions on the flow chart.

Flow chart