Premiering on YouTube: https://youtu.be/V3wfW83Capk
Marc Feldman (Wohlford Professor of Biological Sciences Stanford) joins Sally Otto (UBC) and James O'Dwyer (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) to discuss the role of chance opportunities in his successful career and the importance of thinking broadly.
* Favourite aha moment: His initial discovery of the Reduction Principle (that transmission rates evolve to be more perfect at equilibrium in the absence of interacting processes), leading up to the elegant general proof by Lee Altenberg and Marc in PNAS (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1619655114)
* A paper that he wishes was better known: his 1976 paper with Cavalli-Sforza that originated the idea of gene-culture co-evolution (TPB 1976; https://doi.org/10.1016/0040-5809(76)90047-2)
* What he wishes was better understood: how the organism changes in response to the environment and how the environment responds to the organism, with intertwined dynamics (niche construction work in collaboration with Kevin Lala and John Odling-Smee, e.g., see their 2024 book “Evolution Evolving”).
* Advice for students: Look historically at major papers from the past, pay attention to how people approached the problems, and try to identify the gaps. When you write, write with the reader in mind, as opposed to you as the author in mind. (Watch also for some fantastic tips for being a great supervisor.)
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