Definitely goes to one Soren Vedal. And not just because he gave one of the two talks that came in under time - seriously, is it me or a cultural thing or something else entirely that makes me hate it when speakers go over time? It's not that they haven't know for several months how long their talk should be and haven't had time to practice. It wasn't terribly problematic today, but still.
Anyway. The talk was in the session about
temporal phenomena on a biological time scale. It communicated a system
level concept, cleanly and efficiently in an engaging manner.
you had a population of bacteria. At the population level (definitely
not the individual level) it makes sense to sacrifice some of your, less
fit populace, so that there are more resources for the better adapted
to survive. This being a basic trade off called hedging your bets.
can be improved upon though. When bacteria divide, they don't divide
evenly. A disproportionate amount of any damage that a bacteria may have
suffered is shunted off into one of the two offspring. This results in
one bacteria in better shape and more able to reproduce than another.
Which in the longer term means taking less time to replicate and the
proportion of undamaged cells increases. More
environmental pressure exacerbates this effect. It is basically
diverting you damage
that a population suffers off to into a redundant evolutionary side
track and out of the population. The average damage goes down and the
population growth rate also slowly increases. Which is better than
static bet hedging.
And all backed up with experiments that fit the predicted patterns.
Nice theory. Nice system. Well communicated.