The EBM in Marseille was about a year ago (September 2014), but I don’t mind a bit of blog anachronism. I post this from the European Society for Evolutionary Biology conference in Lausanne. If you happen to be here, you can see me talk about signatures of selection in feralisation in Symposium 20 on Tuesday afternoon.

If you saw a bearded man carrying a pink bag scrambling towards Gare de Marseille Saint-Charles (pictured below; an incredibly beautiful train station) while eating boiled potatoes from a plastic bag, you may have witnessed my stylish departure from Marseille. This was during the Air France strike, and I had just learned that I could catch a train to Nice and go from there. In a moment of brilliance or cheapness, I also decided to spend the night at the airport Nice Côte d’Azur.

The conference itself was nothing short of wonderful. There were many interesting talks, but it was small enough that everything fit in one track, and there was plenty of time to meet people. The conference also ended with the nicest social activity at any conference I’ve been to: a group of participants went for a walk around Marseille with Pierre Pontarotti and his cute little dog. Myself, I presented our comb size work (2012 paper, 2014 paper and some new stuff). I felt like it went rather well. It seems someone else in the scientific committee thought so too, because I got invited to write a chapter for the book with meeting participants that they make each year. The invitation was to write an overview of the field we talked about, so I wrote about ”The genomics of sexual ornamentation, gene identification and pleiotropy”. One can have a look at the chapter on Google Books. The chapter goes through genomic studies (mostly QTL mapping and gene expression microarrays) on sexual ornaments, and some of the problems and promises.

I am not really sure when the book came out; I saw it popping up on Google Scholar the other day, but I haven’t seen the final version of my chapter. I assume a book is on it’s way or waiting for me when I get back from ESEB.

Pontarotti Pierre (Ed). (2015) Evolutionary Biology: Biodiversification from Genotype to Phenotype. Springer.