From the Archive: Dr. Dolph Schluter on Evolutionary Biology

This interview was first broadcast on February 25, 2021 on The Blue Hour on CiTR 101.9 FM at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Dolph Schluter is an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia and one of the world's leading authorities on ecology and the divergence of new species. His research spans speciation, natural selection, adaptation and adaptive radiation, including decades of work with Darwin's finches in the Galapagos Islands and threespine sticklebacks in British Columbia. At the heart of our conversation is the question that has animated evolutionary biology since Darwin: how do species form, diverge and persist? Near the end of our conversation, Schluter describes Charles Darwin's closing passage in On the Origin of Species as his favourite passage in all of literature: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone…