Evolution of Structure and Function in Biology

21-25 October 2002

Organizer: Sándor Pongor, Trieste, Italy

The official course poster

The goal of the workshop is to give a broad, interdisciplinary overview on the unifying concepts of evolution, ranging from genes, genomes, protein structures to behaviour, languages, and computational approaches.

Invited speakers include:

• Derek Bickerton (Honolulu, USA): Thought and language
• Luca Cavalli Sforza (Stanford, USA): From hunting-gathering to religion, art and biotechnology: biological and cultural evolution
• Jean-Louis Deneubourg (Brussels, Belgium): Information processing in insect societies
• Andrei Gabrielian (Washington DC, USA): Approaches and Challenges of Annotation of the Human Genome
• Balázs Gulyás (Stockholm, Sweden): Major transitions and major gaps in evolution
• Peter Hammerstein (Berlin, Germany): Evolutionary models of conflict and cooperation
• Stevan Harnad (Montréal, Canada): Evolution of behavior, cognition, and consciousness
• Eugene Koonin (Bethesda, MD., USA): Major transitions in evolution: a genomic perspective
• Simon Kirby (Edinburgh, UK): The Transition to Language: Where Learning, Culture and Evolution Meet
• Gary Marcus (New York, USA): Plasticity and nativism: Towards a resolution of an apparent paradox.
• Roger H. Pain (Ljubljana, Slovenia): Evolution of protein folding
• László Patthy (Budapest, Hungary): Evolutionary Innovation through Modular Assembly
• Sándor Pongor (Trieste, Italy): Knowledge representation in molecular evolution
• Luc Steels (Paris, France): Evolving Embodied Minds
• Miroslav Radman (Paris, France): Evolutionary paradigms from studies of bacteria
• Eörs Szathmáry (Budapest, Hungary): Major Transitions in Evolution
• William S-Y. Wang (Hong Kong, China): Do languages leak?
• Lewis Wolpert (London, UK): Evolution of Development