The Joan Plaza Auditorium of the Botanical Garden of the University of Valencia (UV) will host on Saturday, May 7, between 9:15 a.m. and 2:00 p.m., the XXIII edition of the Morning Session on Evolution, which this year deals with naturalist contributions and their influence in Spain, the evolution of the human species and the adaptation of mutations in the environment. The event, organised by the Valencian academic institution, is divided into three lectures and a final debate.

Those who have not registered yet can attend on Saturday until the capacity is exhausted by providing their data.

Pilar Domingo, researcher of the Ramón y Cajal program, and director of the Environmental and Biomedical Virology group of the I²SysBio Institute of Integrative Biology (UV-CSIC) will give, at 12:15 p.m., the lecture Biological fight and evolution, on the implication of mutations in the interactions between viruses, bacteria and humans, and how this process causes a constant biological struggle. For his part, Juli Peretó, professor of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of the UV, will moderate the final debate of the Morning Session.

Agustí Camós, a graduate in biology and PhD from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), and author of the book La huella de Lamarck en España en el siglo XIX, will give the first lecture of the morning on the figure of Lamarck, at 9:15 a.m. The researcher on natural history in Catalonia and Spain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will discover the scientific contributions of the naturalist, his influence in Spain and how certain recent discoveries question the orthodox interpretations of the theory of evolution.

Following this, at 10:30 a.m., Alba Motes, a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Ecology at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, will use the Animal Culture conference to show that cultural capacity is the secret of human evolutionary success. In it, the differences between human culture compared to other animal cultures, the study of cultural variation in different species will be addressed and the evolutionary origin of human cultural dependence will be defined.

The Morning Session has the support of the Rector’s Delegation for University Integration, the UV’s Lifelong Training and Educational Innovation Service, the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECyT), the Ministry of Science and Innovation, and the Cavanilles Institute for Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology (UV). The I²SysBio Institute of Integrative Biology and Systems, a joint UV-CSIC centre, the Faculty of Biological Sciences (UV), the Botanical Garden (UV), the Mètode magazine, the Catalan Society of Biology and the Institut d’Estudis Catalans also participate in it.

The morning sessions are an action that is part of the Annual Plan of Activities of the UCC+i of the University of Valencia, which has the co-financing of the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology, and the Ministry of Science and Innovation.