Allen's+Teen+Science+Cafe+improbable+Destinies

Science Cafe: Improbable Destinies: Fate, change and the future of evolution On February 2nd, I attended a Teen Science Cafe meeting at the Daily Planet Cafe in the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. The subject of this meeting was Improbable Destinies: Fate, change, and the future of evolution. The speaker of this presentation is Jonathan B. Losos, a biology professor and curator of herpetology at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. He brought up many possibilities in evolution that would change fate of our world. He talked a lot about evolution such as divergent and convergent evolution. For an example, he used the velociraptors from Jurassic Park to illustrate how the world would be different if evolution favored large brains, which would result an animal like us called dinosauroid.

This is related to the curriculum with topics discussed about evolution and its ecological Niche. The ecological niche of a particular species will affect how an individual evolve and will cause divergent and convergent evolution. Convergence happens when species that have similar niches tend to evolve similar sets of traits, even if they are unrelated in different parts of the world.