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41st LaFollette Lecture: Amanda Ingram, 9/16/2021

a woman standing in front of a screen

The LaFollette Lecture series was established in 1982 by the Wabash College Board of Trustees to honor Charles D. LaFollette, their longtime colleague on the Board. The lecture is usually given each year by a Wabash College faculty member who is asked to address the relation of his or her special discipline to the humanities, broadly conceived. This year's lecture, 'Shaped By History,' was delived by Amanda Ingram, Professor of Biology. Presented with the accompanying photos are excerpts from her lecture.

a woman standing at a podium

'If I’m completely honest, human-focused questions, which are really at the heart of humanities, wouldn’t rank terribly high in the list of things I find intellectually compelling. But as I thought about how I might approach this assignment, I began with some careful examination of the questions that do interest me and the approaches I take to answer them. This led naturally to a rather uncomfortable subject that crops up periodically in my special field: is what systematists do actually science?'

a woman standing at a podium with a microphone

'Data are collected and analyzed, and then one evaluates the hypothesis. Was it refuted? Interesting! Was it not refuted? Also interesting! Regardless, the outcome will lead to more questions...it’s a wonderfully self-sustaining process that allows you to probe ever deeper into the inner workings of our world.'

a woman standing at a podium

'My scientific subfield is called Systematics. It’s a relatively young discipline, one that wasn’t possible to imagine until we had a good handle on how evolution works. But it has much deeper roots in an older field called Taxonomy, which is focused on assigning names to the organisms around us and building classifications to organize this vast biodiversity.'

a woman standing at a podium

'(Carl) Linn?us’ system arrived at an opportune moment, at least viewed from the perspectives of a Euro-centric assessment of scientific progress. Around the time that Linn?us developed his taxonomic conventions and classification system, European naturalists were increasingly travelling the world and “discovering” species not yet known to 皇冠足球比分_澳门皇冠体育-在线|平台@stern science. Linn?us’ system allowed names to be applied and enabled rapid categorization of, and thus communication about, the incredible biodiversity found throughout the world.'

a woman standing at a podium

'1859 Charles Darwin published a figure (and a lengthy explanation of it, in The Origin of Species) that eventually changed everything for taxonomy and classification. This humble collection of intersecting lines brilliantly illustrated Darwin’s radical idea that all species that live and have lived on our planet could trace their origins to a single common ancestor and that the vast biodiversity we see today arose as a consequence of billions of years of selection on naturally-existing variants (as well as some other evolutionary processes that came to be understood later).'

a woman standing at a podium

'(Darwin) envisioned the ends of the branches as representing individuals in multiple genera, so we might label them oaks and chestnuts and reveal the representation that each genus has a more recent common ancestor than the group as a whole. This was a tremendous insight. Now classifications can be viewed as hypotheses of properties of nature. Rather than representing groups of species that are simply more similar to each other than they are to other equivalent groups, as is the case with Linn?us’ artificial system of classification, taxa now can be viewed as hypotheses of common descent.'

a woman standing at a podium

'(German entomologist Wili) Hennig also refined our understanding of what natural groups should be. In addition to all members of a taxon tracing their evolutionary history back to a single common ancestor, Hennig felt strongly that a natural group should include all descendants of that common ancestor.'

a woman standing at a podium

'So let’s get back to my question: is what contemporary systematists do science? ... 皇冠足球比分_澳门皇冠体育-在线|平台@ are, at heart, historians in lab coats. 皇冠足球比分_澳门皇冠体育-在线|平台@’re trying to make sense of the outcomes of nature’s experiments rather than experiments of our own design.'

a woman standing at a podium

'What aspects of nature interest me, and how do I go about understanding what nature values? First and foremost, I am a plant systematist. I could give another entire lecture on why I’m so fascinated with plants, but for today’s purposes, let’s just say that I love that plants aren’t bound to many of the rules that seem to limit the ways animals exist in this world.'

a woman standing at a podium

'I’m also motivated to better understand the histories of human-plant interactions, so these complementary interests in economically important plants and polyploidy are what brought me to the group I’ve spent most of my career working on: the genus Eragrostis, commonly known as the lovegrasses. The most well-known economically important species in the genus is Eragrostis tef, commonly known as tef, a cereal crop grown in Ethiopia and used to make breads like injera.'

a woman standing at a podium with a microphone and a paper

'I started working on Eragrostis largely because I was curious to know what wild species gave rise to tef. Knowing this could facilitate improvement of the domesticated species because wild relatives often harbor desirable traits that can be bred into the domesticate by hybridization and selective breeding. I found its closest wild relative easily enough, but on examination of the phylogenies that addressed that question, it became obvious that some more fundamental work on classification was necessary.'

a woman standing at a podium

'The first official mention of Eragrostis was actually in Linn?us’ Species Plantarum, but he applied the name as a specific epithet, not as a generic name. In 1812, a French botanist named Palisot de Beauvois correctly realized that the species to which Linn?us applied this name did not actually belong in the genus Poa and instead elevated the name to the rank of genus.'

a woman laughing with a book

'If we view this through the lens of modern systematics, we effectively have hypotheses of characters present in the common ancestor of all extant species of Eragrostis. In other words, this name represents a history, and my job is to deepen our understanding of that history.'

a woman with grey hair

Following the lecture in Salter Hall, Dr. Ingram and attendees enjoyed a reception on the Fine Arts Center patio.

a woman smiling with a book in her hand

There were plenty of smiles had on the patio.

a group of people standing outside

Ingram chats with Professor of Biology Eric 皇冠足球比分_澳门皇冠体育-在线|平台@tzel (left) and Alex Rotaru '22.

a group of people outside

Ingram chatted with colleagues from across the academic divisions.

a man standing next to another man

Wabash President Scott Feller (left) listens intently to Fred Emhardt '82.

a group of men talking outside

Stephen S. Bowen '68, former Chair of the Wabash College Board of Trustees (left) chats with 皇冠足球比分_澳门皇冠体育-在线|平台@tzel.

a group of women smiling

Cheryl Hughes, Professor of Philosophy, Charles D. and Elizabeth S. LaFollette Distinguished Professor in the Humanities (left), shares a laugh with Julia Phipps, Academic Administrative Coordinator to the Fine Arts Center.

a man in a suit talking to another man

Jeffrey Gower, Assistant Professor of Philosophy (left), shares a moment with Julian Whitney, Assistant Professor of English.

a woman smiling at camera

Jane Hardy, Associate Professor of Spanish, enjoys a light monent on the patio.

a woman smiling in a black dress

'This is why systematists spend our time exploring the consequences of nature’s experiments. By understanding what shaped our past, and what nature valued, we can prepare for our future.'


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