• 17:30 - 18:30
• A V Hill Lecture Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre, Cambridge

Our behaviour is characteristically organized in a hierarchical structure of goals and subgoals, with many fragments of behaviour contributing to an everyday activity such as making breakfast or attending a lecture.  Such goal-directed structures are often impaired following major damage to the frontal lobes of the brain.  I shall describe a core discovery of human brain imaging – a nine-patch network recruited for addressing a very broad range of cognitive challenges, based in frontal cortex but with additional components elsewhere.  This network is strongly activated by a standard test of “fluid intelligence”, known to predict success in all kinds of activities and presumably requiring mental operations of very widespread importance.  From human brain imaging, I shall move on to electrophysiology in the behaving monkey.  In a network of frontal lobe regions, putatively homologous to regions of the human network, I shall show encoding of core components of a goal-directed plan – current state, goal, component moves and hierarchy.  Damage to this network, I suggest, underlies the broad behavioural impairment that can follow frontal lobe damage.

• 17:30 - 18:30
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre, Cambridge

Viruses generally get a very bad press. Deservedly so. Viruses cause serious epidemics and pandemics in humans and threaten food security by causing crop and livestock diseases. However, of the more than 10³⁰ virus particles that exist at any instant, few endanger us, plants, or animals. Most infect bacteria and archaea and without these viruses Earth’s biosphere would collapse.

Viruses are the largest group of emerging plant pathogens. But paradoxically, many confer benefits on plants that may increase survival and reproductive success. These apparently mutualistic effects may be conditional, for example, by aiding host survival under conditions of drought or cold or, more surprisingly, by helping plants attract pollinators.

Certain viruses, notably ‘partitiviruses’ and ‘endornaviruses’ may have travelled so far on an evolutionary path as to become obligate plant symbionts. These viruses are transmitted exclusively via seed and pollen and are not infectious in a conventional sense (i.e., not transmitted by invertebrates, wounding etc.), and induce no obvious disease. It has been suggested that these ‘persistent’ viruses are mutualists and might be useful in crop breeding. Recent experiments exploring these ideas will be discussed.

• 17:30 - 18:30
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre, Cambridge

For decades, psychologists have characterised young children as little scientists, a comparison made famous by the 1999 book The Scientist in the Crib. A core claim of this perspective is that children (and other animals such as chimpanzees, dogs, and birds) use abstract theories to navigate the world, much like researchers discovering and applying general laws.

This idea is striking when contrasted with contemporary philosophy of science. Within this discipline, there is a consensus that scientists rarely understand the world through universal laws; instead, they operate in a piecemeal, pluralistic way. The world is tangled and dappled. To successfully predict and explain it, scientists often adopt a ‘case-worker’ approach: sifting through a collection of models to determine which one applies here and now. If scientific success relies on this case-worker strategy rather than through the application of general laws, then we should reassess how children and animals learn to navigate the causal world.

In this talk, I develop a case-worker account of how we navigate our everyday physical environments. I draw on embodied and predictive processing accounts of cognition and action to do so. Under this approach, generative models affect how an agent probes the world through actions such as touch or moving their eyes. These models are, in turn, continuously selected and adjusted based on contextual sensory information. Ultimately, this approach shows that successful causal understanding need not appeal to general laws. We do not need to reject the idea of the child as a scientist, but we do need to update our notion of what this means.

• 17:30 - 18:30
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre, Cambridge

The Antarctic environment is changing more rapidly than expected. Over the past few years we have observed warming of the Southern Ocean, melting of ice shelves from below, reduction in sea ice, intense heat waves over the continent and storms that have devastated penguin colonies.

The sea ice that forms around Antarctica as the sea freezes during the winter has been shrinking in extent and has decreased so much around the western Antarctic Peninsula that the UK’s icebreaker, the RRS Sir David Attenborough, has remained south near Rothera station until mid-winter, supporting science in the cold dark conditions for the first time.

These changes impact not only local Antarctic environments and its animals but also affect the whole planet. The loss of ice mass has contributed to global sea level rise and the fresh water entering the ocean will affect global ocean circulation. Antarctica may be remote but change there impacts the rest of the planet, its ecosystems and people. 

• 17:30 - 18:30
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre, Cambridge

Early identification of sex related pheromones of agricultural pests opened similar opportunities for insect vectors of human pathogens. Although small molecules, sophistication in structural requirements for biological activity of the often-novel chemical structures for these pheromones and other semiochemicals must be accommodated. This is achieved by exploiting natural catalytic systems for synthesis with the exact natural isomeric chemistry. Particularly useful are promiscuous enzymes from extremophile organisms that can robustly accept wider ranges of biochemical reaction conditions as well as novel substrates. New developments in sustainable food production have followed with delivery including such biotechnological production, plant genetic engineering and ecosystem management. Also are new offers of sustainable opportunities for human health, as potential impact from infectious disease grows. More realistic but radical scientific thinking could provide: the perennialisation of all arable crops; new interventions in achieving the One Health global concept.