CAM colloquium - Friday, November 10
3:30 p.m.
253 Rhodes Hall - Note Room

Speaker: Steve Olson, Freelance Writer

 

Title: In Search of Our Common Ancestors

 

Abstract: Sometimes the frontiers of research lie just a few steps away from the kind of question someone might ask over beers at the end of the workday. In this talk, I'll describe the work I did on such a question that led to a paper in Nature (Rohde, Olson, and Chang, 2004, Vol. 431, pp. 562-566). The question came up while I was writing my book "Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins." If you consider the direct ancestors of the people living on Earth today -- where a direct ancestor is defined as a person's parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on -- who was the first person going back in time who was a direct ancestor of everyone living today? The answer to this question involves some surprisingly subtle and interesting research based in graph theory and Monte Carlo simulations. But, keep in mind, I am a writer, not a mathematician or scientist (my terminal degree was a B.A. in physics), so I brought to this work the perspective of an outsider.

 

Refreshments at 4:30 in 657 Rhodes Hall.