[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/origin-of-species.jpg” caption=”Darwin’s Legacy: Natural Selection as an Organizing Principle in Science opens today at McMaster, coinciding with the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. Image courtesy Mills Library.”]An international conference that will explore Darwin's contribution to biology opens today at McMaster University. It is being organized to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

“Darwin is the Einstein of biology,” says Ralph Pudritz, director of McMaster's Origins Institute. “He was quite simply one of the greatest scientists of all time and he wrote one of the world's most influential scientific works. Over the past century-and-a-half, his ideas on natural selection have expanded beyond evolution through biology and into other disciplines such as neuroscience, molecular biology, and complexity.”

The conference-Darwin's Legacy: Natural Selection as an Organizing Principle in Science-will bring together scientists from a variety of disciplines who use natural selection (or a variant thereof) as a guiding principle in their research. Among those already confirmed to talk about how Darwin has impacted the modern world of science are: Mark Rausher of Duke University (selection-natural, sexual and kin); James Valentine of University of California, Berkeley (paleontology); Brian Hall of Dalhousie University (diversity); and David Deamer of the University of California, Santa Cruz (origins of life and astrobiology).

Steven Benner, of the University of Florida's Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology, will deliver a free public lecture on May 26 at 8 p.m in the Michael G. DeGroote Centre for Learning and Discovery, Room 1305. He will explain a new link being forged between physical science and biology that is changing the way research is conducted into such things as disease and treatment, and even the search for life on other planets.

Full conference details can be found at http://origins.mcmaster.ca/conferences.php.