Douglas Futuyma is Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University and the author of two standard college textbooks, Evolutionary Biology and Evolution, as well as a popular classic, Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution. He has received numerous awards for his teaching and for his research, including in 2012 the Joseph Leidy Award for Research Achievement given by the Academy of Natural Sciences. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fulbright Fellow, has served as president of the Society for the Study of Evolution, the American Society of Naturalists, and the American Institute of Biological Sciences, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2006. He writes of his talk, “Birders frequently face questions that fall within the province of evolutionary science. What are species? Are they real or arbitrary? How confident can we be about which species belong in which families? What are the differences between ‛phases,’ ‛morphs,’ ‛races,’ and ‛subspecies’? Why do some birds lay many eggs and some few? What accounts for odd geographic distributions of some families? I will talk about some of these and other issues, and I plan to open the floor to discuss any other questions about the evolution and ecology of birds that audience members may wish to raise.”
