The Gene's Eye View of Evolution

UW J.F. Crow Institute Darwin Day lecture, Room 1111.

media release: This year’s invited speaker is J. Arvid Ågren, a research associate in the Theory Division at the Lerner Research Institute of the Cleveland Clinic and a Part-time Lecturer in the Department of Biology at Case Western Reserve University. He is also an Affiliated Researcher at the Evolutionary Biology Centre at Uppsala University. He did his PhD on transposable element and genome size evolution with Stephen Wright at the University of Toronto, then did his post-doc in Andy Clark’s Lab at Cornell on conflict and co-adaptation between sex chromosomes and mitochondrial genes in Drosophila melanogaster. He then worked as a Whenner-Gren Fellow both with David Haig at Harvard and as an independent researcher at the Evolutionary Biology Centre at Uppsala University.

His recent work is on developing population genetic theory to understand how genetic conflicts arise and are resolved, and how they fit into general models of social evolution. But he is also interested in the history and philosophy of science, as evidenced by his recent book, The Gene’s-Eye View of Evolution (Oxford University Press 2021). The book outlines the selfish gene’s account of evolution, tracing its historical origins, clarifying typical misunderstandings, and showing why so many evolutionary biologists still consider it an indispensable heuristic. Richard Dawkins himself wrote the blurb for this book, saying

“Arvid Ågren has undertaken the most meticulously thorough reading of the relevant literature that I have ever encountered, deploying an intelligent understanding to pull it into a coherent story. As if that wasn’t enough, he gets it right.”