Participants

Adi Livnat is an Associate Professor in Evolutionary and Environmental Biology and the Institute of Evolution at the University of Haifa in Israel. He is interested in the fundamental question of how evolution happens. He has developed a theoretical account - Interaction-Based Evolution - which argues that the mutations driving adaptive evolution can be neither random nor Lamarckian: they can respond in general not to information that comes directly from the immediate environment (as in Lamarckism) but to information that has accumulated in the germline genome as a result of evolution. Thus, evolution results from co-evolving interactions of mutation-specific probabilities of origination and selection. One empirical prediction of this account is that mutation-specific rates can come to respond to specific selection pressures following multiple generations under selection. The Livnat Lab has developed a variety of novel genomic methods to test these predictions across loci and organisms.