Entomologist Continues ALLELE Series

Talk will focus on early evolutionist Alfred Wallace

Dr. James Costa, professor of biology at Western Carolina University, will deliver the next installment in the ALLLELE lecture series on March 13. The lecture will be at 7:30 p.m. in 127 Biology on The University of Alabama’s campus in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

This year marks the eighth year of the ALLELE series, which is an interdisciplinary lecture series organized by UA’s Evolution Working Group.

James Costa
Dr. James Costa will speak at The University of Alabama on March 13 at 7:30 p.m. in the Biology Building auditorium, room 127.

James Costa is executive director of the Highlands Biological Station and professor of biology at Western Carolina University. He has studied insect social behavior from the Appalachians to Latin America to Europe. Costa is also a longtime research associate in entomology at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and, in 2004-2005, was Jeanne Rosselet Fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

His talk is titled “Alfred Russel Wallace’s ‘Species Notebook’ of 1855-1859.” It will focus on the naturalist Alfred Wallace and his progress on theories pertaining to the natural world, specifically Wallace’s work that essentially paralleled Charles Darwin’s, as a contemporary of Darwin’s.

Costa is the author of The Other Insect Societies (Harvard University Press 2006) and The Annotated Origin (Harvard 2009), an annotated edition of On the Origin of Species designed to help readers better understand the historical context, structure, and content of Darwin’s masterwork.

The ALLELE series is supported by UA’s College of Arts and Sciences and the departments of anthropology, biological sciences, chemistry, communicative disorders, geological sciences, philosophy, physics, and religious studies.

The College of Arts and Sciences is the University’s largest division and the largest liberal arts college in the state. Students from the College have won numerous national awards including Rhodes Scholarships, Goldwater Scholarships and memberships on the USA Today Academic All American Team.