Videos of talks

Some of my lectures have been recorded as videos. Here they are, roughly in temporal order. In some cases the website hosting the video also has a PDF of the lecture slides available, which will be clearer than any slides you can see in the video.

• At Microsoft Research in December, 2007 in a workshop on “Computational Aspects of Biological Information”, a lecture on “Reconstructing Phylogenies: How? How Well? Why?,” At the link you will be able to access the video in two formats, the audio recording in two formats, and the slides in two formats. Also archived at archive.org here. If you want a clearer view of the slides, here they are as a PDF.
• Systematics Association Julian Huxley Lecture, July 2008, auditorium of the Linnean Society, London. Richard Bateman is in the chair. Here you will also find the projection slides, as a PDF. This talk covers the use of threshold models for discrete 0/1 traits and use of fossil species in model-based frameworks.
• Lecture at 500th Convocation of the University of Chicago, (also available at Youtube here) October, 2009 (the sound for Marty Kreitman's introduction breaks up, but the rest of the sound is clear). If you want a clearer view of the projection slides, here they are as a PDF. This talk argues that the separate lines of work on within-species molecular population genetics and between-species molecular evolution are now merging in a major event, a Grand Reunion.
• At the University of California, Davis on 21 April, 2010 I gave the Storer Lecture. Introduction by Carl Boettiger. Coincidentally, Tracey Storer was the author of the introductory textbook used in the first-year zoology class I took at the University of Wisconsin in 1960. The PDF of the slides I use in the talk is here. There is a transcript of my talk also available at the video site.
• Evening at the Genome lecture in Seattle on 28 July 2010 in the Genome Sciences Department public lecture series, on “Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam: Who do your genes come from?”  Video is in two parts. For greater clarity, here is a PDF of the slides.
• A web talk on 24 January 2011 on the subject “What poultry breeders and guinea pigs have to tell us about statistical nonmolecular phylogenetics”, in Erick Matsen's interesting series of talks by various people working on phylogenies. It is available also in its original format, which uses Java and may require too much memory on your machine.
• Mary Kuhner interviews me in the Distinguished Faculty Interview Series of our department on 5 June 2012. I ran over, which I can't say surprised anyone.
• The Japanese television clip showing me receiving the International Prize for Biology on 18 November 2013, making some remarks, and Joan and I greeting the Emperor and Empress.
• I gave a talk on "A Brief History of Computational Phylogenetics" on 4 August, 2016 in Erick Matsen's "phyloseminar" series of online talks. Video of the talk and of the discussion on YouTube here. (The sound gets a little disconnected from the image in the part at the end where you can see me talking).
• Video of a lecture on 27 October 2016 hosted by the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México, on "How can phylogenies illuminate morphological evolution?". My hosts were the Departamento de Biología Evolutiva with funding from the Colegio Nacional. The introduction in Spanish by Antonio Lazcano and the question period are not included in the video. The PDF of the slides will be found here. An MP3 recording of the sound will be found here which includes the introduction and the question period as well. Some of the questions are very faint in the recording and you may have to increase the volume to hear them.
• Video of my 2018 Fisher Memorial Lecture which was given as part of the "PopGroup" (Population Genetics Group) in their 51st annual meeting. (It was almost exactly 50 years from the date of the first PopGroup meeting, which it happens I attended). The audience was in Bristol, U.K. However I was in Seattle and the talk was given using Skype. The video shows me and also my slides. The title was "Is there a more fundamental theorem of natural selection?". The topic is not really Fisher's Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection, but how we might, in a "toy" model, connect energy, entropy, and a measure of biological information. The talk is introduced by the chair of the Fisher Memorial Trust, Sir Walter Bodmer, an old friend and onetime co-author of a paper with me. The PDF of the slides I use is available here. another place to view the lecture video is here.
• Video of my talk to the North Seattle Tech Forum on August 6, 2018 on "Who your genes come from -- in the short term and in the long term". This is a series of talks run (partly) by my old friend Ken Berkun. He has posted a video of the talk. A PDF of the projection slides will be found here. I have alse recently found that some of my calculations were done -- a few years earlier -- by Graham Coop at the University of California, Davis. They will be found at his lab's blog. Start here: https://gcbias.org and look at his category of "genetic-genealogy" posts. Fortunately, Graham and I came to very similar conclusions.
• Video of my talk at the SteveFest, a symposium celebrating the retirement of Stevan Arnold, which occurred on 27 July 2019 at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon. Not only a talk, but a performance as well. I describe the Evolutionary Quantitiative Genetics Workshop and how it came to be. Here is a PDF of my slides, including some views of Friday Harbor Labs that I forgot to show when I lectured.
• A video of a conversation with Casey Dunn of Yale University on 26 January 2021. It covers my involvement with phylogenies, in particular the history and internal structure of my PHYLIP package of progrms. This includes a walkthrough of the internals of Dnaml, one of those programs. The whole thing is nearly 2 hours long and does require some background in biology and in phylogenetic methods.
• On August 27, 2021 I was the guest on one session of Youtuber AronRa's series "Matter of Fact: Science". This involved answering questions, mostly about phylogenies and classifications. The questions were asked by him and his colleagues who run the series, and texted questions from listeners. Some of which defied comprehension. The session was live but the recording will be found here.
• On 8 June 2022, Fred Bookstein and I gave an invited lecture at the Workshop on Stochastic Morphometrics which celebrated the opening of the the Centre of Computational Evolutionary Morphometry at Copenhagen University. The video includes a lecture by me on our approach to morphometrics, which urges use of a nonlinear statistical model, without using morphospace, and without discarding size. Fred speaks at the end commenting on metadata and database issues raised by a previous talk in that Workshop.

Videos of course lectures

• Lectures in the one-week summer tutorial on Evolutionary Quantitative Genetics, given at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, were live-streamed and also video-recorded in the years 2014, 2015, and 2016. The videos for these years have been posted to YouTube. From 2017 to 2019 we ran the Workshop at Friday Harbor Laboratories of the University of Washington. In 2021 we ran it as Zoom sessions, and the videos of the lectures are available on Vimeo. All of these include a number of lectures by me (I was co-leader of the Tutorial). The 2014-2016 video is a bit strange as two cameras show images of different parts of the front of the lecture room, and these are shown side by side, sometimes resulting in two simultaneous images of the speaker. In the 2016 course, I was not present in person, appearing instead by Skype on a monitor at the front of the room.
  • Youtube channel for videos from the 2014 tutorial
  • Youtube channel for videos from the 2015 tutorial
  • Youtube channel for videos from the 2016 tutorial
  For years 2014-2016 there are links to the web page for that year's course. From there you access the WordPress blog for the course which has a schedule of lectures and pages for each lecture, with PDF or PPT slides for the lecture and an audio recording of it as well.
  For the 2021 videos, start at the webpage here, go to the Schedule, and there find links to pages for the lectures, each of which has a link to the Vimeo video for that lecture. The discussion and computer lab sessions do not have videos.