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Interviewer(s)
Art Woods, Marty Martin
Interviewee(s)
Sonia Sultan
Description
Does biological plasticity have a cost? Are there evolutionary consequences of plasticity and of organisms acting on their environments?
In this episode, we talk with Sonia Sultan, the Alan M. Dachs Professor of Science in the Department of Biology at Wesleyan University. Sonia has spent her career studying the interplay between organisms and their environment. Specifically, she studies how environmental conditions influence the development of organisms, and when and how these developmental trajectories can include niche construction. Sonia refers to this complexity as “entanglement,” genes and environments working together to alter phenotypic expression, but then variation in phenotypic expression feeds back on environments and genes to alter evolution. She put this perspective to the test in a recent paper coauthored with Mike Wade in the Journal Evolution & Development. In it, Sonia and Mike took a new perspective on the Price equation, finding that niche construction and other forms of organismal agency can change evolutionary outcomes.
Cover photo: Keating Shahmehri
Date Published
12-14-2023
Language
eng
Length of Episode
1 hour, 20 minutes, 46 seconds
Digital File Format
audio/mp3
Document Type
Podcast
Recommended Citation
Woods, Art and Martin, Marty, "Episode 112: The Entangled Organism (with Sonia Sultan)" (2023). BigBiology Podcasts. 115.
https://scholarworks.umt.edu/bigbiology_podcasts/115