European Society For Evolutionary Biology Research Articles

Secretary's Report, 2022 : American Society of Naturalists.

Secretary's Report, 2022 : American Society of Naturalists.

Travel for two.

As I boarded the plane to Spain a few months ago, I looked forward to catching some sun and scientific stimulation at a conference in the middle of the dark, wet Swedish winter. I went through my upcoming oral presentation in my head as my 4-year-old ran ahead, searching for our seats. We have traveled together as a dynamic duo ever since my baby was 3 months old, when we set off to Brazil to attend a conference and conduct fieldwork. I am a nontenured researcher looking for a permanent academic position, and travel is crucial for building my reputation and CV. But this trip would be our last for a while, because paying for my child's travel has rendered me a bankrupt botanist. ![Figure][1] ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT NEUBECKER > “Paying for my child's travel has rendered me a bankrupt botanist.” As a single parent with no family members nearby, I have no alternative but to bring my child with me when I travel for work—and to pay for it out of my own pocket. The expenses add up quickly, including airfare, child care, and increased food costs relative to what we would spend at home. For years, I decided it was worth it. I need to do fieldwork to keep my career going. By giving seminars, presenting at conferences, and participating in working groups, I raise my profile with potential employers and—I hope—improve my chance of landing a permanent position. So, when potential trips came up, I usually took them. But the costs have started to become untenable. To have enough money to pay for rent, groceries, and other necessities, I have become very particular about which opportunities I accept. I've had to decline invitations to give seminars at major institutions and keynote presentations at conferences because the trips would have been too expensive. I can only say yes when an opportunity is too good to turn down and the travel will be relatively affordable. I recently traveled to Germany to participate in a working group—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend 4 days with eminent people in my field discussing a new data set and novel ways to analyze it. It was a tremendous experience, and I'm glad I went. But my child and I ate simple meals for weeks afterward to offset what I spent to participate. Support for dependent travel is simply too rare. Some institutions, particularly U.S. universities, offer grants for this purpose. Last year, I was thrilled to win a €500 “attendance aid grant” offered by the European Society for Evolutionary Biology for its meetings, which covered my child's airfare and child care at the conference. But I have not been able to find any other similar grants or support that I can apply for—from funding agencies, scientific societies, or my institution. On the bright side, free or subsidized child care seems to be getting slightly more common, at least in my field. At the recent working group in Germany and the conference in Spain, free child care was available for anyone who needed it—essential support that made my participation possible. On another occasion, when I said I would have to turn down an invitation to give a lecture because the travel would be too expensive, the organizers offered free child care for the day, which made it feasible for me to attend. But child care is only one piece of the puzzle. More universities, funding agencies, scientific societies, and conference organizers should offer grants and other support mechanisms for parents and other caretakers who incur additional expenses for work-related travel. I acknowledge that resources are limited, and I fully understand the pushback these types of proposals can elicit. Why should hard-won money go to paying for my child's travel? Why should my family be treated differently than any other, in academia or in any workplace? My response is that if academics like me are not supported, we will continue to hit the “glass ceiling,” fall through the “gender sieve,” or whatever else you want to call it. Making science equitable is not about giving everyone the same opportunities; it's about supporting the needs of individual scientists so that we all can thrive. [1]: pending:yes

Gender differences in authorships are not associated with publication bias in an evolutionary journal.

The loss of talented women from senior academic positions has partly resulted from a lower number of published papers and the accompanying reduced visibility of female compared to male scientists. The reasons for these gender-differences in authorship is unclear. One potential reason is a bias in the editorial and review process of scientific journals. We investigated whether patterns of authorship and editorial outcome were biased according to gender and geographic location in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. Such potential bias may contribute to inequality in the field. We found patterns of gender differences in authorship, but this was unrelated to the editorial decision of whether to publish the manuscript. Female first-authors (the lead role) were six times less likely to be named as the corresponding author than male first-authors, and female first-authors were more likely to be displaced as corresponding authors by female co-authors than were male first-authors. We found an under-representation of female first- and last-authors compared to baseline populations of members of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (which publishes the Journal of Evolutionary Biology) and of Evolutionary Biology faculty at the world top-10 universities for the Life Sciences. Also, manuscripts from Asia were five times more likely to be rejected on the final decision, independent of gender. Overall our results suggest that the peer review processes we investigated at the Journal of Evolutionary Biology are predominately gender-neutral, but not neutral to geographic location. Editorial gender-bias is thus unlikely to be a contributing factor to differences in authorship in this journal.

Are females in good condition better able to cope with costly males?

This work was supported by Australian Research Council (M.J.), the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (Hewitt Mobility Award 2017 to M.I.C.), and a TalentHub grant from the Agencia Andaluza del Conocimiento (S.Z.).

Isabelle Olivieri (1957–2016)

Isabelle Olivieri sadly passed away on 10 December 2016, after a long fight against cancer; she was 59 years old. Isabelle was a pioneer in developing genetic and population models, and her work was quickly acclaimed internationally. She was an inspiration for many and an exceptional role model for French scientists and women in science. Her academic career started at the National Agronomic Institute in Paris (AgroParisTech), one of the most competitive academic institutes in France. There, she qualified as agronomic engineer (1980) and received a doctorate degree in 1982. She was then awarded a PhD from the University of Montpellier where her research developed in an Australian laboratory (CSIRO) based in France. After a postdoc in Stanford with Paul Ehrlich (1983), the National Institute for Agronomic Research (INRA, France) hired her as research scientist. In 1993, she became full professor of population genetics at the University of Montpellier – aged only 36. During her early career, she worked on invasive plants. While based in the United States, she then developed interests for the concept of metapopulations (spatially disconnected but yet interacting populations), which formed the core of her research back in France. She published work ranging from highly theoretical pieces to results from intensive fieldwork in France and South Africa, mostly on plants (Medicago, Brassica, Centaurea, Leucadendron). She is world-renowned for having disentangled metapopulation genetics underlying the evolution of dispersal, which she also applied to the conservation of species at the brink of extinction. Her contribution was clearly recognized at an international level. In 2004, she was elected vice-president of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology, and then president in 2007. The same year, she was also elected vice-president of the US-based Society for the Study of Evolution. Unsurprisingly, the newly born European Research Council (ERC) turned to her to chair their first panel in ‘evolutionary, population and environmental biology’. As chairwoman (2008, 2010, 2012), she awarded 36 ERC advanced grants, the most prestigious science scheme in Europe. Naturally, when the 1700-leading researchers’ European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) enlarged its membership to 50 scientists who have made exceptional contributions to ecology and evolution, Isabelle was one of them. And just a month before she died, she was still active at EMBO, sponsoring others to join the organization. Isabelle could be tough, but she was fair. She was a prominent figure of the population genetics group in France, and students may have feared her insightful questions. Undoubtedly her own students have made brilliant careers, as Isabelle was concerned that the most promising, young French researchers quickly find permanent positions in which to develop their professional and personal lives. While fighting a particularly harsh cancer, Isabelle remained incredibly strong – as I was asking about her, she responded: ‘Ça va, à part ce qui ne va pas, Bises, Isabelle’. She will be greatly missed.

Fewer invited talks by women in evolutionary biology symposia

Lower visibility of female scientists, compared to male scientists, is a potential reason for the under-representation of women among senior academic ranks. Visibility in the scientific community stems partly from presenting research as an invited speaker at organized meetings. We analysed the sex ratio of presenters at the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) Congress 2011, where all abstract submissions were accepted for presentation. Women were under-represented among invited speakers at symposia (15% women) compared to all presenters (46%), regular oral presenters (41%) and plenary speakers (25%). At the ESEB congresses in 2001–2011, 9–23% of invited speakers were women. This under-representation of women is partly attributable to a larger proportion of women, than men, declining invitations: in 2011, 50% of women declined an invitation to speak compared to 26% of men. We expect invited speakers to be scientists from top ranked institutions or authors of recent papers in high-impact journals. Considering all invited speakers (including declined invitations), 23% were women. This was lower than the baseline sex ratios of early-mid career stage scientists, but was similar to senior scientists and authors that have published in high-impact journals. High-quality science by women therefore has low exposure at international meetings, which will constrain Evolutionary Biology from reaching its full potential. We wish to highlight the wider implications of turning down invitations to speak, and encourage conference organizers to implement steps to increase acceptance rates of invited talks.

Two Decades of Molecular Ecology: where are we and where are we heading?

The twentieth anniversary of the journal Molecular Ecology was celebrated with a symposium on the current state and the future directions of the field. The event, organized by Tim Vines and Loren Rieseberg, took place on the opening day of the First Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology organized by the American Society of Naturalists (ASN), the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution (CSEE), the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB), the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE) and the Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB) in Ottawa (Canada) from 6–10 July 2012. The get together of these five societies created a truly international and exciting “Evolution conference” and the ideal framework for the Molecular Ecology symposium. Its thirteen talks were grouped into the five different subject areas of the journal: Speciation and Hybridization; Landscape Genetics, Phylogeography and Conservation; Ecological Genomics and Molecular Adaptation; Kinship, Parentage and Behaviour; Ecological Interactions. Each session was followed by a panel discussion on the future direction of the subfield. That more than 300 colleagues registered for this special symposium illustrates the broad interest in, and appreciation of, molecular ecology – both the field and the journal.

WWDD? (What Would Darwin Do?)

WWDD? (What Would Darwin Do?)

Editorial: 2008 year in review.

2008 was an eventful inaugural year for Evolutionary Applications. We published four issues comprising 45 papers in total, including the special issue: Evolutionary Perspectives on Salmonid Conservation and Management. Wiley-Blackwell sponsored an Evolutionary Applications symposium at the Canadian Society of Ecology and Evolution annual meeting in Vancouver (May), and hosted an official Evolutionary Applications launch reception at the SSE annual meeting in Minneapolis (June). The journal received much press coverage, and was featured in both Nature and New Scientist. The year was successfully capped with the acceptance of the journal for full indexing in ISI. The Editorial team would like to thank the scientific community for their overwhelming support of this new and unique journal. Undoubtedly this support, as well as the official endorsement of the journal by both the Society for the Study of Evolution, and the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB), contributed to the exceptionally rapid acceptance of the journal into ISI. In 2008, Evolutionary Applications published papers in most of the fields listed on our website (http://www.evolutionaryapplications.org; see Table 1). Published papers also focused on a wide diversity of organisms of applied importance, including plants, animals and microbes (Table 2). Clearly, the journal is fulfilling its primary goal of being the principal outlet for the increasing number of high-quality papers using evolutionary concepts to address issues of economic, medical and social relevance. Table 1 Subjects covered in 2008 in Evolutionary Applications Table 2 Examples of organisms of applied significance featured in Evolutionary Applications In 2009, we are again publishing four issues, including this current special issue on evolutionary medicine, and an upcoming special issue on the impact of harvesting on fish evolution and Darwinian fishery science. Among other events, in August, Wiley-Blackwell will be sponsoring a full-day symposium on evolutionary applications at the 12th ESEB Congress in Turin, Italy. Despite being in our first year of operation, we succeeded in maintaining a very short time from submission to first decision (34 days). Also, our transparent online review and production system allows authors to track the progress of their manuscripts from submission to publication. We will continue striving both to publish the highest quality research on applied evolution, and to make the importance and broad relevance of evolutionary biology more accessible to all interested readers.

How the European Society for Evolutionary Biology and the Journal of Evolutionary Biology were founded

How the European Society for Evolutionary Biology and the <i>Journal of Evolutionary Biology</i> were founded

Godfrey Hewitt — Recipient of 2005 Molecular Ecology Prize

Godfrey Hewitt — Recipient of 2005 Molecular Ecology Prize

Presidential address

This issue commemorates the 10th biannual congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB). The foundation of the Society in 1987 must have been exactly at the right moment. In retrospect, the state of the field of evolutionary biology in Europe at that time can be compared with a saturated salt solution, requiring just a trigger to crystallize into a coherent structure. It was the neo-European Steve Stearns, then zoology professor at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who possessed the required authority and organizational talent to provide this trigger. The first ESEB congress, held in 1987 in Basel, was immediately a big success, attracting some 450 participants from all over Europe. The next congresses have been held in various European cities and attracted between 500 and 700 participants, with one outlier: Barcelona in 1999 with over 900 attending. The ESEB congresses have increasingly attracted participants from North America. Steve Stearns was also responsible for founding the Journal of Evolutionary Biology (JEB). JEB is now fully owned by ESEB and is published by Blackwell Publishing. Like ESEB, JEB has shown a remarkably successful history. Over the years the number of submitted manuscripts has steadily increased and is still increasing. The journal has established a solid position in the field. Particularly impressive is the sharp reduction in manuscript handling time, thanks to a very dedicated board of reviewing editors. The mean time between submission and final decision is now about 60 days. Parallel to the above mentioned increase of North American participants to the ESEB congresses is the increase in JEB articles from North American authors. I have no doubts that both ESEB and JEB have been very important in stimulating European evolutionary research and in establishing collaboration within Europe. I very much welcome the increasing involvement of North American evolutionary biologists as is apparent from the trends mentioned above. European evolutionary biology is flourishing, although there are signs that also in Europe nonscientific opposition to evolutionary thinking is becoming more vocal. In opposing this ESEB can play a very useful role.

Call for Symposia for the 9th Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology, Leeds, UK, 2003

Call for Symposia for the 9th Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology, Leeds, UK, 2003

Linking functional and evolutionary genomics

An international initiative, ‘Evolutionary and Ecological Functional Genomics’, is sponsoring a series of symposia that are intended to catalyze syntheses spanning functional analyses, genetics and evolution (http://pondside.uchicago.edu/∼feder/EEFG.html). The symposia are supported by The National Science Foundation, and will take place at the annual meeting of the Society for Experimental Biology (UK, April), the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Evolution (USA, June), and the annual meeting of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (Denmark, August).However, these meetings are only part of the story – the project is really an attempt at social engineering, with the goal of shifting the way that scientists interact with one another, creating new scientific communities and encouraging the exchange of information between different fields of biology. PK

Evolution enters the genomic era.

A report on the 18th Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB), Aarhus, Denmark, 20-25 August, 2001.

ANNOUNCEMENT: The VIIIth Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology, 20–25 August 2001, Aarhus, Denmark

ANNOUNCEMENT: The VIIIth Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology, 20–25 August 2001, Aarhus, Denmark

ESEB 2001, Eighth Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology, Aarhus, Denmark

ESEB 2001, Eighth Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology, Aarhus, Denmark

VIITH Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology 24–28 August 1999 Barcelona Spain

VII^TH Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology 24–28 August 1999 Barcelona Spain

Biodiversity in a Vial of Sugar Water

ARNHEM, THE NETHERLANDS-- At the recent meeting of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology here, researchers described how microbes living in a vial full of nutrient broth can form a rainforest in miniature, quickly diversifying into a range of new forms. While the diversity is nothing like the dizzying array of forms that emerged from, say, the Cambrian explosion half a billion years ago, it does bear some of the hallmarks of such macroevolutionary events, which means that evolutionary biologists can study these miniature adaptive radiations for clues to what drives them in nature.

Sixth Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology

Sixth Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology