The Responsive Plant and What It Tells Us About Evolution, Genes, and Living Things Master ClassIn-Person
Monday, Nov 25, 2024
9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m
New York Botanical Garden
2900 Southern Blvd
Bronx, NY 10458
The New York Botanical Garden has been a connective hub among people, plants, and the planet since 1891. They're rooted in the cultural fabric of New York City, in the heart of the Bronx—its greenest borough.
Get into the weeds with evolutionary plant ecologist Sonia Sultan, who will introduce the plant way of life and share examples of plant flexibility from her research. Plants live their quiet lives all around us, renewing the oxygen we breathe, spreading leafy canopies that intercept the sun’s rays, performing their floral sex lives in partnership with wind, insects, and hummingbirds. Literally rooted to the spot, a plant must cope with environmental challenges by constantly adjusting its body and behavior. Yet as biology has turned to genes to explain adaptive features, this remarkable capacity for response has been largely overlooked. This master class will place these plant insights in a broader context through an illustrated overview of Darwinian natural selection and Mendelian genetics, as we discuss how adaptive responsiveness can change our understanding of evolution, and deepen our awareness of the surprising ways that plants—and all organisms—interact with their environments.
BIOLOGY, EVOLUTION, LIFE SCIENCE, GENETICS
Sonia Sultan
Sonia Sultan studied history and philosophy of science at Princeton University, before earning her PhD in organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the UC Davis Center for Population Biology, she joined the biology faculty at Wesleyan University, where she has taught plant biology and evolution for thirty years. She now holds Wesleyan's Alan M. Dachs Chair of Science. Author of the award-nominated book Organism and Environment, Sultan also serves on the advisory board of the Kellner Center for Neurogenomics, Behavior and Society.