The annual Biodiversity and Ecosystems Chair is supported by the Jean-François and Marie-Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre Foundation.

Biodiversity dynamics and evolution : species formation, domestication and adaptation

Today's threats to biodiversity are manifold. To conserve biodiversity and the countless services it provides, we need to understand how biodiversity was formed and what factors influence its dynamics. The theory of evolution by natural selection offers an extremely powerful paradigm for understanding why the living world is the way it is, for understanding how biodiversity is formed and what its dynamics are, and for understanding how populations manage to adapt or not to a changing environment.

In this course, we'll look at the history and principles of the synthetic theory of evolution, and how it enables us to understand the adaptation processes of living beings, the formation of species and their diversity, and how new technologies for sequencing genetic information have enabled us to make major advances in our understanding of adaptation mechanisms. In particular, we'll look at organisms domesticated by humans as examples of strong and recent selection that has led to impressive diversifications, with important consequences for agronomy and the environment. We will also analyze the emergence of new crop diseases and pesticide resistance, biological invasions and other phenomena threatening biodiversity.