Evolutionary Synthesis Center Conference Workshop II, January 31- February 3, 2002, Belmont, Md

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Evolution has long served to unify the study of biology, but now it has acquired a more central role. Today evolution serves to inform data acquisition, analysis and interpretation in all of the life sciences. This transformation comes in part from the explosion of raw data, from sources as far ranging as genome sequences, functional genomics, ecological genomics, large-scale ecosystem studies, long-term behavioral studies and phylogenetics. There is no institution or funding agency dedicated to the consolidation, synthesis and dissemination of this broad sweep of evolutionarily relevant information. NSF sponsored a workshop in Spring 2001 to address the need for an evolutionary synthesis center (ESC) and to develop an action plan to meet this need (award DEB-0120472; draft report at http://frog.biology.yale.edu/esc). The participants unanimously agreed that there is a clear and compelling need for a center to promote and facilitate evolutionary synthesis. Although the first workshop made impressive progress in the development of an ESC working model, it became clear that a second workshop would be required to address several topics in more detail. The goal of this proposal is to hold a second ESC workshop to address the following issues. First, if a center is to be embraced by the diversity of the evolutionary community, it is critical that comments and suggestions from that community be incorporated into the earliest possible phase of ESC development. Thus a draft report from the first workshop was made available to the relevant scientific communities and comments and endorsements were solicited. One focus of the second workshop is to address all of the concerns raised. Second, the participants of the first workshop were chosen for their ability to represent the diversity of evolutionary research. The resulting group did not have adequate strengths in the areas of bioinformatics, information technology, statistics, and mathematics to determine the needs of the proposed Evolutionary Informatics Division (EID) of an ESC. An appropriate group of such specialists will be invited to participate in the second workshop to consider the goals, content and capacities of the EID more carefully. Finally, because in the first workshop little attention was paid to how to achieve the goals of the Outreach Division of an ESC, this will be another focus for the second ESC workshop.