- Richard A. Fortey er en av verdens ledende autoriteter på sitt felt, og en etterspurt foreleser. Det er et privilegium for NHM å ønske ham velkommen som gjesteforeleser her hos oss, sier professor David L. Bruton, som selv delte et lite telt med Fortey nord på Spitsbergen en forblåst måned i 1971.
Fortey er ekspert på trilobitter og graptolitter, og ordoviciumtiden som de levde i. Han arbeidet lenge ved Natural History Museum i London, og har siden 1997 vært medlem av the Royal Society i samme by.
Han har skrevet flere populærvitenskapelige bestselgere, og blitt belønnet med flere priser for formidlingsarbeidet sitt.
Forteys forelesning er spesielt tilrettelagt for Darwins jubileumsår, og han har besøkt København, Stockholm og Vilnius med den før han kommer hit til Oslo. I tilllegg til forelesningen skal han sammen med Bruton studere hittil ubeskrevne trilobitter som de sammen samlet inn for 38 år siden.
The lecturer
While still a student at Cambridge University studying geology, Richard Fortey joined an expedition to Spitsbergen in 1967 and brought back a fascinating collection of Ordovician trilobites from the shores bordering Hinlopen Strait of Ny Friesland (79ºN). In 1971 he joined an expedition from the Palaeontological Museum at Tøyen to Hinlopen where collections produced a unique and enlarged fauna of trilobites, graptolites, brachiopods, cephalopods and a host of microfossils among these conodonts, radiolaria and what has since become identified as an early vertebrate. Trilobites became the subject of Fortey's Ph.D thesis published in the form of three important monographs.
During his career at the Natural History Museum, London, Richard Fortey became a world authority on trilobites and graptolites together with research on Ordovician palaeogeography and correlation, arthropod evolution and the origin of major groups. In 1997 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society and was President of the Geological Society of London for its bicentennial year of 2007. To the general public Richard Fortey is best known for his books. In 1993 The Hidden Landscape was named Natural World Book of the Year. He won the Lewis Thomas Prize for science writing (2003) and in 2006 was holder of the Royal Society's Michael Faraday Prize for the public communication of science. Other best selling books include Life: An Unauthorised Biography. A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth (1997), Trilobite!: Eyewitness to Evolution (2000), The Earth: An intimate History (2004) and Dry Store Room no.1 (2008).
In this Darwin Year, Richard Fortey has been a sought after lecturer and comes to Norway following a lecture tour to Copenhagen Stockholm and Vilnius sponsored by the British Council.
Abstract
Charles Darwin famously described what he termed 'difficulties on theory' in Chapter 6 of The Origin of Species, and more particularly ' the absence of intermediate forms'. A century and a half of palaeontological exploration since the publication of the Origin has indeed presented a range of truly intermediate forms which bridge some of the most important thresholds in the history of life: the transition of vertebrates from water to land; the origin of birds and the colonisation of the skies; human origins and the inferred rise of consciousness.
However, the more intermediate fossils that are discovered the more complex the tree of life becomes -- simple evolutionary trees become complex tangles. It may be preferable to think of life's history as a progressive emergence of complex systems as each new adaptive threshold is crossed. The early phases at single cell level took up much of earth's 3.5 billion year history of life, but transformed the atmosphere so that more complex life forms could emerge. The 'Cambrian evolutionary explosion' (and the Ediacaran that preceded it) saw the emergence of complex and large marine animals in a rapid period of innovation.
Some ecological structures appeared almost immediately and have continued to re-organise themselves after each mass extinction event: striking examples of the repeated appearance ("re-evolution") of the oceanic 'reef' habitat will be given. The same could be said of the arboreal habit in plants. These kinds of emergent system present multiple opportunities for ecological subdivision and co-evolution, and hence drive much of the biodiversity of the planet. Whether one might apply the same mode of explanation to the emergence of intelligence is an interesting and controversial question.