Society of Systematic Biologists

The Systematics Association Sir Julian Huxley lecture for 2010 will be "Species for Macroevolution" by Prof. Andy Purvis, Imperial College, London. The lecture will be held at The Linnean Society, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, Wednesday 7th July 2010, 6 pm. The meeting is open to visitors. Wine will be served after the lecture to members and guests.

Abstract: Species are fundamental units for evolutionary biology. Alone among the levels of classifications into which we place individuals, the species level has the potential to have an objective reality: when we count them, we think we are counting something meaningful. If we compare number of species in different taxa, regions, or times, we are led to try to understand why the numbers are different or similar. Incomplete knowledge may lead us to use higher taxa, such as genera or families, instead, but we do so in the hope and expectation that they will reflect what good species-level data would show. I will argue: 1. That this hope is misplaced – analysing higher taxa conflates processes that should be kept separate; 2. That analysing temporal patterns in numbers of higher taxa might be particularly problematic when using large, multi-author databases; 3. That even species cannot be used uncritically in macroevolutionary analyses – even with good data (a complete phylogeny of present-day species, or a complete record of fossil species) – but that 4. The best fossil records can let us come close to the ideal species for macroevolution, letting us tackle questions that cannot be addressed any other way.

The Society of Systematic Biologists invites proposals for symposia at the 2011 Evolution meeting to be held in Norman, Oklahoma, from 17-21 June 2011. The meeting will be held jointly with the American Society of Naturalists and the Society for the Study of Evolution, and our host is University of Oklahoma.

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, and (4) an indication of whether the speakers have been invited and whether they have agreed to participate.

iEvoBio is being held jointly with the Evolution Meetings as a satellite conference, for the first time in 2010 in Portland, Oregon.

Among the different events are a visualisation challenge, keynote presentations, full and lightning talks. Registration opened February 12th, and the Call for Abstracts for full talks is now open (with a deadline of April 8). For more details visit the iEvoBio site http://ievobio.org/.

A one day meeting on arthropod divergence time estimation is being held at Rutgers University, New Jersey on Friday, January 8, 2010. Registration is free, but space is limited; please pre-register soon so that we will have an idea of numbers, either using Doodle or by emailing Jessica Ware). An official meeting website is coming, but in the meantime you can also visit the meeting's Facebook page.

Have you attended the US Evolution meetings in the past? Do you plan to attend them in the future? If so, we'd like to get your input regarding childcare and MentorNet mentoring programs offered at the conference.

With funding from an Elsevier Foundation New Scholars Grant, on-site childcare and email-based MentorNet mentoring programs were offered for the first time at the Evolution 2009 conference in Moscow, ID, and will be offered at Evolution 2010 (Portland, OR) and Evolution 2011 (Norman, OK).

The survey will take about 5 minutes, and your responses are completely anonymous. Please click Here to take survey.

Thanks for taking the time to help out!

Heidi Meudt & Leah Larkin

NESCent Phyloinformatics VoCamp

OPEN CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

Integrating diverse biological data with the historical process of evolution is a grand challenge for 21st century biology. The interoperability of data from diverse fields (e.g., genetics, ecology, biodiversity, biomedicine) requires a technology infrastructure based on formalized, shared vocabularies. Developing such vocabularies is a community project. In order to build controlled vocabularies and ontologies, the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent: http://nescent.org) is sponsoring a "Phyloinformatics VoCamp".

Evolution 2009 is drawing close, and there are a few logistic updates. It will be possible to register to attend at any time, so walk-ins are fine. Meanwhile, if you plan to use conference bussing, on-campus housing, or to subscribe to a meal plan, please do so on or before May 24.

Thanks, and we look forward to seeing you all in Moscow!
Olle Pellmyr
Program chair, Evolution 2009

Evolution Meeting
Portland State University
Portland,Oregon
25-29 June, 2010.

The Society of Systematic Biologists invites proposals for symposia at the 2010 Evolution meeting to be held in Portland, Oregon, from 25-29 June 2010. The meeting will be held jointly with the American Society of Naturalists and the Society for the Study of Evolution, and our host is Portland State University.

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. Symposia are restricted to half-day sessions. The society is particularly interested in symposia whose topics do not overlap with those from previous meetings (see SSB website for past symposia), that introduce new ideas or synthesize important concepts, or those that are particularly good examples of the analysis of empirical data. Proposals that unite systematics with other fields are also desirable. We encourage participation from young investigators and others typically under-represented in symposia.

Dear members of ASN, SSB and SSE,

We are pleased to announce that the Evolution Tri-Societies Mentoring Program is now up and running in collaboration with MentorNet! This free program is available to ALL members of ASN, SSB and SSE. MentorNet is an award-winning mentoring organization that matches mentors with compatible protégés for an eight-month pairing, which includes weekly or biweekly e-mail discussion prompts to foster supportive mentoring relationships.

The published deadline for talk/poster presentations at the upcoming Evolution meetings in June at U of Idaho (http://
evolutionmeetings09.org) is April 5. As several people have indicated that they need more time, we have decided to extend the deadline to April 17.

On behalf of the organizing committee, I thank you for registering promptly, as it makes all the difference is assembling the meeting schedule.

Olle Pellmyr