Every few years, critics of evolutionary theory have argued that the field needs a radical overhaul, and this trend shows no sign of stopping. This talk will discuss some recent challenges to core parts of evolutionary theory, focussing on the most serious and substantial challenges, which have come from evolutionary biologists themselves. I will trace many of these debates back to the contested legacy of R. A. Fisher (former head of the Department of Genetics in Cambridge), arguing that the reception of his work has cast long shadows. Throughout, the issues at stake will be illustrated with recent empirical work, especially from the Mexican cave tetra (Astyanax mexicanus), and the bacterial pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
Over the last 18 months a quiet AI revolution has begun in the field of numerical weather prediction. Medium-term weather prediction involves forecasting several days to a couple of weeks in the future and these forecasts are critical for making many social and economic decisions. The standard approach to this problem is to run detailed global simulations of the earth's atmosphere using a supercomputer, so-called numerical weather prediction (NWP). As little as one year ago, researchers in this field had thought it unlikely that machine learning approaches would be competitive with numerical weather prediction any time soon. However, over the last year, the same advances that underpin large language models, like ChatGPT, have been applied to weather prediction. Surprisingly, these models achieve a performance which is already competitive with standard NWP, but with a computational cost that is 1000s of times cheaper. The deep learning based forecasts have also been shown to be surprisingly robust, performing reasonably even when faced with rare or extreme events. Consequently, weather prediction centres like the World Meteorological Organisation and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) are now racing to build machine learning teams and publicly testing AI forecasts. This talk will describe this quieter AI revolution and it will end with a discussion of the opportunities for AI and machine learning in weather and climate, and speak a little more widely about the balancing act that must be struck between regulation and adoption of AI technology.
Subscribe to our lectures on talks.cam
From Darwin’s paper on evolution to the development of stem cell research, publications from the Society continue to shape the scientific landscape.
Mathematical Proceedings is one of the few high-quality journals publishing original research papers that cover the whole range of pure and applied mathematics, theoretical physics and statistics.
Biological Reviews covers the entire range of the biological sciences, presenting several review articles per issue. Although scholarly and with extensive bibliographies, the articles are aimed at non-specialist biologists as well as researchers in the field.
The Spirit of Inquiry celebrates the 200th anniversary of the remarkable Cambridge Philosophical Society and brings to life the many remarkable episodes and illustrious figures associated with the Society, including Adam Sedgwick, Mary Somerville, Charles Darwin, and Lawrence Bragg.
Become a Fellow of the Society and enjoy the benefits that membership brings. Membership costs £20 per year.
Please Note: Due to building works, the CPS office at 17 Mill Lane, Cambridge is now closed until further notice. Business operations as usual. Please contact us by email only: philosoc@group.cam.ac.uk
Cambridge Philosophical Society17 Mill LaneCambridgeCB2 1RXUnited Kingdom
Office Hours: (Temporarily closed)Monday and Thursday -10am-12pm and 2pm-4pm.
philosoc@group.cam.ac.uk