Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge
Free Lecture Event – Online & In Person
Evolution Matters Lecture Series
Speaker: Jonathan Losos, Director, Living Earth Collaborative; William H. Danforth Distinguished University Professor in Arts & Sciences, Department of Biology, Washington University in St. Louis
Do lions and tigers meow? Why does my cat leave dead mice at my feet? Should I get a pet ocelot? How did the cat make its leap off the African plain? The domestic cat has, through both natural and artificial selection, transformed into one of our planet’s most successful and diverse species. Yet the cat, ever a predator, still seems only one paw out of the wild.
Join Jonathan Losos, scientist, cat lover, and author of The Cat’s Meow (Viking Press, 2023), to learn how researchers are using modern technology to unravel the secrets of the cat and explore the future for both Felis catus and Homo sapiens.
Copies of The Cat’s Meow will be available for sale before and after the program.
“[An] engaging and wide-ranging narrative…The Cat’s Meow is a readable and informed exploration of the wildcat that lurks within Fluffy.”
—The Washington Post
“Losos is an engaging and often funny guide who explains the science clearly and with nuance.”
—New Scientist
[A] labyrinth of fascinating riddles explored by Jonathan Losos—himself a lifelong ailurophile as well as an eminent evolutionary biologist—in this engaging and very smart book.”
—David Quammen, author of The Song of the Dodo and Breathless
Advance registration is recommended.
Free event parking at the 52 Oxford Street Garage starting at 1:00 pm.
About the Speaker: Jonathan Losos is an evolutionary biologist known for his research on how lizards rapidly evolve to adapt to changing environments. He holds an A.B. from Harvard University and a PhD from the University of California. After a postdoctoral stint at the University of California, Davis, Jonathan moved to Washington University for his first faculty position, before leaving to become a professor of biology at Harvard and Curator in Herpetology at the university’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. He then returned to Washington University in 2018 to become the founding Director of the Living Earth Collaborative, a partnership between Washington University, the Saint Louis Zoo, and the Missouri Botanical Garden. This new biodiversity center, nearly unique in partnering a leading university, zoo, and garden, has a mission to advance knowledge and conservation of biodiversity. Losos has written more than 250 scientific papers and three books, most recently The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa (Penguin Random House, 2017), and is an author of a leading college biology textbook (Raven et al., Biology). Losos has been elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and is the recipient of the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences, the Theodosius Dobzhansky Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution, the Edward O. Wilson Naturalist and the Sewall Wright awards from the American Society of Naturalists, and the David Starr Jordan Prize.
