Society of Systematic Biologists

The PhyCom server has been hacked, so the site will be down for a few days. There are some sad people in this world who have nothing better to do than create needless work for others.

St�©phane Guindon and Olivier Gascuel's paper
A Simple, Fast, and Accurate Algorithm to Estimate Large Phylogenies by Maximum Likelihood, published in the October 2003 issue of Systematic Biology is the ISI's February 2005 "fast breaking paper in field of Environment/Ecology."

According to the ISI, a fast breaking paper is a paper in the top 1% of the most cited papers in a field which has had the largest percentage increase in citations from one bimonthly update to the next.

Based on papers presented at the first Mathematics of Evolution and Phylogeny conference, this book is now available from Oxford University Press and Amazon.

The second Mathematics of Evolution and Phylogeny conference will be held in Paris this summer.

LaTeX users can rejoice as thanks to Ashleigh Smythe there is now a BibTeX template for formating references in Systematic Biology style. The template and instructions on how to use it are here.

The April 2005 issue is now online.

Any and all poems concerning the theme of evolution are solicited; serious, funny, tragic, elegant, nonsensical, in any style including tanka, limericks, haiku, free verse, couplets, and epic poems.

Winner(s) to be announced and poem(s) read at the
Annual Meeting Banquet in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Prize(s) also remain to be determined, but will be glorious and highly desirable.

Call for applications for undergraduates of diverse backgrounds to attend the 2005 meeting of the Society for the Study of Evolution/Society of Systematic Biologists

and

Call for volunteer mentors for this program from graduate
students, postdocs and faculty.

For full details visit the website.

The February 2005 issue is now available. Data sets and appendices can be downloaded from here.

The Society for Systematic Biologists invites proposals for symposia at the 2006 SSB meeting to be held at the State University of New York, Stonybrook June 23-27, 2006. The meeting will be held jointly with the American Society of Naturalists and the Society for the Study of Evolution. Proposals should include (1) a descriptive title, (2) one or two paragraphs explaining the purpose of the symposium and its relevance to systematics, (3) a list of presentations including proposed speakers, their institutions or affiliations, and their presentation titles, (4) an indication of whether the speakers have been invited and whether they have agreed to participate, and (5) the proposed length of each talk.

Ernst Mayr, noted evolutionary biologist has died aged 100. There is an obituary in the Harvard Gazette