Seminars in Hearing Research at Purdue (SHRP)

Date: Thursday, September 9, 2021

Time: 10:30 – 11:20 am

Location: LYLE 1150

Title: Resources that are relevant in the entire hierarchy of life?  Information is one…

Speaker: Jeffrey Lucas, Professor, Department of Biological Sciences

Abstract: Biology is a hierarchical phenomenon. The investigation of biological systems is also, necessarily, hierarchical. Unfortunately, there is relatively little crosstalk across disciplines that address biological phenomena at different scales. For example, structural biologists don’t often talk to community ecologists.  NSF funded a series of country-wide workshops that focused on this issue with the hope of finding possible research protocols that bridge disciplines.  Our group in these workshops focused on the possibility that scale-independent resources might help scale-dependent scientific inquiry.  I’ll talk about the 4 “resources” we identified: energy, conductance, storage, and information, with an emphasis on the idea that information is truly a resource that is critical to all biological systems irrespective of scale.  I offer 3 (+1) examples of how information organizes systems from tiny to massive.  You’ll also see where niche construction fits into the big, and sometimes into the smaller, picture.

Zoom Info:

https://purdue-edu.zoom.us/j/93108158900?pwd=RDdTQ0Z4UE9Rb0JUenhjMG1SMkp2QT09

Meeting ID: 931 0815 8900

Passcode: 11501150

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The working schedule for this academic is here:

https://purdue.edu/TPAN/hearing/shrp_schedule

The titles and abstracts of the talks will be added here:

https://purdue.edu/TPAN/hearing/shrp_abstracts