Natural Selection and 'Darwinian Demons'

About the lecture

In the first mini-lecture, we ask the question: why do we age? At first glance, it doesn’t seem like there is a clear answer. If we understand natural selection as a means of maximising lifetime fitness to produce more offspring, surely an individual that did not age would increase the population of a species much more than someone who did? Why also, do some organisms live longer than others, even between individuals of the same species? This first mini-lecture begins to tackle this question by understanding natural selection. We examine the three key components of natural selection that enable characteristics to evolve over time. To continue this, we learn about the term ‘Darwinian demons’: individuals that are long-lived or immortal, and consistently produce high-quality offspring. It is a term theorising the existence of species that do not follow Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, and we learn about some species in nature that could be Darwinian demons.

About the lecturer

Professor Luana Maroja is an academic at Williams College, with a Ph.D. from Cornell University. She is interested in the evolution of barriers to gene exchange, speciation, population genetics and phylogeography. Her study systems are crickets (Gryllus), arctic plants and butterflies (heliconius). She currently teaches Genetics and Evolution, and her areas of expertise are in evolutionary genetics, speciation, landscape genetics.