On October 22, 2025, EAS Professor P. David Polly will receive the 2025 Rohlf Medal for Excellence in Morphometric Methods and Applications at Stony Brook University, New York.
Quoting Stony Brook: "The title of his talk is "Paths through morphospace: morphometrics, phylogenetics, and evolution."
In this talk, Polly, professor and chair in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington and a visiting professor at the University of Helsinki, will explore examples of contradictions he has encountered in his own morphometric research on evolution. He’ll provide examples in which ancestral reconstructions are not biologically plausible, where “straight” evolutionary paths predicted from developmental genetics are not straight or even continuous in morphospace, and where mathematically real parts of morphospace are not biologically real. Polly does not believe there is any easy fix to these problems, nor that the problems invalidate current approaches, but does believe that they can lead to incorrect interpretations in some situations and that they deserve deeper thought.
P. David Polly received his PhD in 1993 from the University of California, Berkeley. He has developed new frameworks for evolutionary and ecological analysis. Polly's current and future morphometric work is focused on spatial processes in phenotypic evolution and on evolutionary ecology and 'ecometrics' of complex, morphological traits.
About the Rohlf Medal
The Rohlf Medal was established in 2006 to mark the 70th birthday of F. James Rohlf, distinguished professor emeritus, Department of Ecology and Evolution, and research professor. This medal recognizes distinguished members of the morphometrics community for their outstanding work on the development of new morphometric methods or for their applications in the biomedical sciences."
The College of Arts