On April 8th, Dr. Suegene Noh, Colby College’s own Assistant Professor of Biology, contributed to our Presence of The Past lecture series with a presentation titled “How current genomes are shaped by evolutionary pasts.” This lecture was extremely fascinating and certainly stood out from our previous lectures. We have heard a lot about the impact of the humanities, psychology and literature has on our present day interpretation of the past. However, Dr. Noh was the first presenter to introduce explicit science into one of our talks. Her ideas were unique and her presentation was very well articulated. She understood and adapted to the fact that most people in the room did not have extensive knowledge surrounding the concepts of “multicellular aggregated amoebas” – this I really appreciated. Yet, her ideas fully fit into the Presence of The Past series mold. She began the lecture by discussing the context of her profession. Dr. Noh is an evolutionary biologist and primarily discusses the parallel between genetics and social interactions amongst multicellular organisms.
Continue reading “Competition Between Amoebas: A Fight for Evolution”