A Letter from Stony Brook

Last night I took the ferry across Long Island Sound to spend the day in Stony Brook at Evolution 2006, the joint annual meeting of American Society of Naturalists, the Society for the Study of Evolution, and the Society of Systematic Biologists. About 1500 scientists were there, and there were enough talks going on--often simultaneously--to keep me in constant motion from eight in the morning till eleven at night. The presentations were all over the map. In one study, scientists were pinpointing the molecular changes that Southwestern Indians have acquired to their cells as they adapted to life in the desert--adaptations that now leave them prone to obesity and diabetes. In another, scientists were measuring the cost of immunity to understand why we don't do a better job of fighting diseases. Other researchers were building trees of life to understand the long-term patterns of evolution, such as how humans expanded ...