Red Queen Evolution from Tropical Oceans to Fitness Snowscapes

The diversity of beetles is widely known - but beetles are complex creatures living in diverse locations so they don’t all compete. Far less well known is the diversity of bacteria within species, most surprisingly with huge number of variants living together and directly competing for very long times. Why doesn’t “survival of the fittest” drive almost all the variants extinct? An example of an extremely important seemingly-simple bacterial species will motivate asking general questions about the role of biological complexity and modeling the effects of this by statistical-physicsy high-dimensional models. Are extensive within-species diversity and continual evolution - together the roots of more interesting evolution - surprising?  

Speaker: Daniel S. Fisher, Stanford University