The brainers
Guillaume Lecointre – Zoologist and systematician
Guillaume Lecointre is a teacher-researcher (UMR 7205), zoologist, systematician and professor at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, where he is Scientific Advisor to the President. He is the author of 122 professional publications and 22 books. His research focuses on the phylogeny and systematics of teleost fishes, using both molecular and anatomical data. His field of zoology is the Antarctic continental shelf. His activities to improve science teaching and disseminate knowledge are highly significant, including a ten-year stint as Charlie Hebdo’s weekly science columnist. He is a double laureate of the Société zoologique de France (1996, 2006), the 2009 national prize of the Comité Laïcité République, the 2012 prize of the Union Rationaliste, and was made a knight of the Légion d’honneur in 2016.
This brainer takes part in round-table discussions, offers improvisation sessions and the following solo talks:
Does the individual evolve over time?
If time manifests itself to us through cause-and-effect relationships, we'll see that among the cells that make up an individual, the same causes generate the same effects as among the individuals that make up a genealogical lineage. The latest biology tells us that, contrary to what we once learned at school, the time of the individual is the same as the time of evolution. Natural history teaches us to play with scales of time and space to understand the diversity of natural phenomena; in this case, if natural selection is first understood as stabilizing, it takes place in a single time at all spatial scales. Consequently, the individual is a historical trajectory of cells, just as the species is a historical trajectory of individuals.