College of Sciences

Environmental journalist and author Ben Goldfarb reveals the story of how one biologist spread a non-native species of lizard across the Northeast. According to Goldfarb, Queens College professor of biology Jon Sperling secretly captured, bred, and released Italian wall lizards for many years. 

“Regardless of how much you love lizards—and I love lizards a lot—you can’t do that,” says James Stroud, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences. “They are incredible organisms to watch, and they’re beautiful. I can understand his perspective, but I can’t agree with his actions.”

DNA samples from one of the world’s largest and oldest plants — a quaking aspen tree (Populus tremuloides) in Utah called Pando — have helped researchers to determine its age and revealed clues about its evolutionary history.

“It’s kind of shocking to me that there hasn’t been a lot of genetic interest in Pando already, given how cool it is,” says study co-author William Ratcliff, an associate professor in the  School of Biological Sciences.

By inputting Pando’s genetic data into a theoretical model that plots an organism’s evolutionary lineage, the researchers estimated Pando’s age. They put this at between 16,000 and 80,000 years. “It makes the Roman Empire seem like just a young, recent thing,” says Ratcliff.

(This also appeared at Newsweek and NewScientist.)

Last week, Michael Wong and Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institution for Science welcomed a diverse group of nearly 100 scientists, from microbiology to neuroscience, for a workshop on how complexity emerges and evolves. It was also a referendum on their audacious proposal, which, Wong said in a talk, is “an explanatory framework for the evolution of physical systems writ large, including, but not limited to, biology.”

It’s an appealing idea, says Loren Williams, a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry who studies the origin of life and attended the workshop. “To me it seems very clear that there is evolution outside of biology.” Take the polypeptide backbone, the chain of molecules that forms the spine of all amino acids, he says. “[Biological] evolution doesn’t touch that, right? It’s the same in everything alive. It always has been. But it’s a product of evolution, I’m convinced.” It’s just that the evolution happened before life began, he says. And so when Hazen and his co-authors proposed their overarching theory, he says, “that just resonated with me.”