By Hilary Miller • 15/12/2009 This post was syndicated from The chicken or the egg - View original source
As part of the celebrations for their 350th anniversary, the Royal Society of London have just released a special, open-access issue of their Philosophical Transactions B journal, containing a series of perspectives from leading scientists on contemporary topics of high interest and importance.
In this freely available issue the authors, selected on the basis of their knowledge and experience in a specific area of the life sciences, offer their individual perspective on their own area of research. The 19 contributions present a snapshot of the current status of key areas of science, together with an analysis of the promising – and less promising – avenues currently being pursued, in some cases leading to some bold conclusions.
Here’s the contents:
Sir Partha Dasgupta: Nature’s Role in Sustainable Economic Development
Professor Simon Levin: Crossing scales, crossing disciplines: collective motion and collective action in the Global Commons
Professor Martin Nowak: Games, graphs and sets: dynamics and geometry of evolution
Professor Harold Mooney: The Ecosystem-Service Chain and the Biological Diversity Crisis
Lord Robert May: Ecological science and tomorrow’s world
Professor Michel Loreau: Linking biodiversity and ecosystems: toward a unifying ecological theory
Professor John Beddington: Food security – contributions from science to a new and greener revolution
Professor William Hill: Understanding and utilising quantitative genetic variation
Professor Graham Bell: Fluctuating selection: the perpetual renewal of adaptation in variable environments
Professor Spencer Barrett: Understanding Plant Reproductive Diversity
Professor Tom Cavalier-Smith: Deep phylogeny, ancestral groups, and the four ages of life
Professor Simon Conway-Morris: Evolution: Like any other science it is predictable
Professor Linda Partridge: The New Biology of Ageing
Professor Fiona Watt and Dr Ryan Driskell: The therapeutic potential of stem cells
Professor Uta Frith and Professor Chris Frith: The social brain: allowing humans to boldly go where no other species has been
Professor Geoffrey Hinton: Learning to Represent Visual Input
Professor Taras Oleksyk, Professor Michel Smith and Professor Stephen O’Brien: Genome wide scans for footprints of natural selection
Sir Sydney Brenner: Sequences and Consequences
And here’s the link.
Read and enjoy!
