Lake Tahoe lecture: Family values -Some insights from the rest of life

UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center invites the community to take a different approach to family values in a public presentation led by Dr. Rick Grosberg. The program will begin at 6 pm on Thursday, October 16 at the Tahoe Center for Environmental Sciences.

Families are a unique arena where conflicts of interest often arise between males and females, between parents and offspring, and among siblings. Family members may often die for each other, but given the right circumstances they will also harm each other. What are the basic rules that in the rest of life that govern whether individuals should harm or help each other? In this talk, Dr. Grosberg considers this question using an evolutionary foundation from research on the family dynamics of snails, seahorses, ants, birds, and bees.

Dr. Grosberg is a Professor of evolution and ecology at UC Davis and is the founding director of the Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute at the Bodega Marine Laboratory. His research focuses on how species of marine invertebrates, ants and fungi use competition and cooperation to maintain genetic variety. Dr. Grosberg previously served as the director of the Center for Population Biology and in 2010 won the UC Davis Prize for Teaching and Scholarly Achievement.

No-host cocktails at 5:30 p.m. and the program will begin at 6 p.m. at 291 Country Club Drive in Incline Village (between Tahoe Boulevard/SR 28 and Lakeshore Blvd.) on the campus of Sierra Nevada College. For more information or directions call 775-881-7566, or visit http://tahoe.ucdavis.edu/events/.