The Diversity of Animals - from Darwin to DNA

Speaker: Professor Peter Holland FRS, Linacre Professor of Zoology

When we think of evolution, the first person that springs to mind is Charles Darwin. In The Origin of Species (1859), Darwin presented evidence supporting evolution, proposed the useful metaphor of an evolutionary ‘tree’, and suggested an underlying mechanism: natural selection acting on variation. But there were still big questions, such as the shape of the tree (who is more closely related to whom?) and the nature of inherited variation (what are variants or mutations?)

In this talk, Professor Peter Holland explored how animal evolution is studied in the 21st century, with a focus on remarkable new insights we are gaining from molecular biology and genome sequencing.

Watch the lecture