acknowledgements
By any standard, the “Darwin's Legacy” student conference that was held this past weekend at UNCW was an extraordinary success. Copies of the distinguished plenary speakers' lectures were filmed by UNCW-TV, and copies will be placed in Randall Library for academic use.
Over eighty graduate and undergraduate students from as far away as the University of Western Australia, University of California, Santa Barbara, University of Florida and Michigan, Duke and Emory and NYU and many other fine schools in and outside North Carolina, including 40 students from UNCW, presented talks and posters at the conference. Darwin's legacy is in good hands.
Student winners in the oral presentations:
- Dillon Niederhut, College of William and Mary
“Adaptive Biases in Human Perception” - Michael Barton, Montana State University
“'I Have Hardly the Means': Charles Darwin, Transoceanic Dispersal, and the Geography of Science” - Jared Poon, University of Florida
“Realization and Teleological Naturalism” - Sean Stankowski, University of Western Australia
“Understanding the Origins of Morphological Variation in the Rhagada Land Snails of Rosemary Island: Population History or Natural Selection?” - G. Alex Janevski, University of Michigan
“The Modern Biodiversity Crisis and Selective Nature of Mass Extinctions” - Jeremy Smyczek, University of North Carolina Wilmington
“Finding Miller's Miracles: Kenneth Miller, God-of-the-Gaps, and Theistic Evolution in Finding Darwin's God”
Student winners in the poster presentations:
- Brandie Littlefield, Emory University
“Teaching Evolution: A High School Teacher Workshop at Emory University” - Christine Murphy, Emory University
“Assessing Teacher Learning at a One-Day Evolution Workshop” - Michael Bertrand, Hope College
“Naturalistic Function, Proper Function, and Serendipitous Malfunction” - Justin Dorff, University of North Carolina Wilmington
“Dizocilpine (MK-801) Impairs Olfactory Memory Span in Rats”
UNCW student oral presenters:
- Brandon Tinklenberg, “Are Biological Taxa Natural Kinds?”
- Adam Fought, “A New Solution to the Commitment Problem”
- Ana Jimenez, “Nuclear DNA Content Variation Implicated in Decapod Crustacean Muscle Fiber Hypertrophy”
- Thiago Lima, “Results from a Blue Mussel Hybrid Zone Question the Role of M7 Lysin as a Speciation Gene”
- Victor Schmidt, “Sexual Conflict and the Evolution of Gamete Incompatibility in a Blue Mussel Hybrid Zone”
- Tse-Lynn Loh, “The Association of the Caribbean Orange Icing Sponge with Scleractinian Corals – An Uneasy Truce”
- Mike Polito, “Effects of Female Age, Breeding Experience and Laying Date on Clutch and Egg Size in the Adelie Penguin (Pygoscelis adeliae)”
- Stephanie White, “Effects of Drilling Predation on Global Turritellid Diversity and Abundance: A Potential Catalyst for Evolution”
- Alexandra Elfner, “Darwin in the New Age: The Theosophical Society and Evolution”
- Jeremy Smyczek, “Finding Miller's Miracles: Kenneth Miller, God-of-the-Gaps, and Theistic Evolution in Finding Darwin's God”
UNCW student poster presenters:
- Lonnie Wyatt, “Deciding the Future: Humanist Secularism -VS- The Abhorrent Course of Theocratic Politics”
- Anton Manasco, “Genetic Hotspots and their Phylogenetic Utility”
- Patricia Mason, “Predator-Prey Relationships in a Middle Eocene Molluscan Fauna from Orangeburg, South Carolina”
- Christy Visaggi, “Outcrop-Scale Variation in Drilling Predation in the Lower Waccamaw Formation of Southeastern North Carolina”
- Andria Salas, “Modeling Indirect Selective Pressure in a Co-Evolving Community”
- Brian Reuhland, “Reconstruction of the Evolutionary History of Parrots (Aves: Psittaciformes) from Retroelement Insertion Events”
- Emily Gould, “Unexpected Absence of Cannibalism for the Naticid Gastropod Neverita duplicata u nder Experimental Conditions of High Competition
- Greg Burzynski, “Bivalve Survival Selectivity During the Late Pliocene: Was High Metabolism a Detriment?”
- Shawn McGuire, “Spatial Variation in Ecological Structure of a Molluscan Assemblage from the Lower Waccamaw Formation, SE North Carolina”
- Lucia Lazarowski, “Effects of Set-Size on Abstract Concept Learning in Rats Using Olfactory (N)MTS Procedures”
- Leah Jordan, “List Linking as a Tool to Test Transitive Inference in Rats”
- Tim Lefever, “Effects of Drugs on Delayed Match and Non-Match-to-Sample Performance using Olfactory Stimuli in Rats”
- Laura Bagge, “Thermal Properties of the Blubber of Adult Female Short-Finned Pilot Whales (Globicephala macrorhynchus)”
- Sarah Hutchinson, “Geographic Variation in the Least Shrew, Cryptotis parva, Throughout its Range in the United States”
- Justin Dorff, “Dizocilpine (MK-801) Impairs Olfactory Memory Span in Rats”
- Cheston Peterson, “Trade-offs in the Evolution of Dental Sexual Dimorphism in Bluntnose Stingrays, Dasyatis say (Lesueur, 1817)”
- Heather DeStefano, “Studies of Hybridization and Introgression in Blue Mussels in Biology 485 at UNCW”
- Lisa Ogawa, “A First Molecular Phylogenetic Study of Grebes (Aves: Podicipedidae)”
- David Hines, “Chemical and Physical Defenses of Caribbean Non-Scleractinian Zoantharians”
- Ying Fang, “Historical Population Genetics of Northern Fur Seals (Callorhinus ursinus) from Three Aleutian Islands using Ancient DNA”
- Christy Visaggi, “Concordance in Rank-Order Abundance of Living and Death Assemblages of Mollusks from a North Carolina Tidal Flat”
- Janie McAuliffe, “Fish Nursery Function of Alternative Estuarine Habitats in Southeastern North Carolina"