Scope:

Darwin’s 1859 book “On the Origin of Species” contained only one figure depicting a tree diagram of species origins and relationships. This little scheme was nevertheless the starting point for the ubiquity of phylogenetic trees in today’s zoology. Every week numerous cladograms representing animal relationships at all levels are published. More and more of these articles deal with the phylogeny of the major groups of multicellular animals (Metazoa). However, these publications show that neither sequence data nor available morphological character sets produce phylogenies that converge to a widely accepted consensus. It is clear that some of the traditional views cannot be maintained and that the framework of a new animal phylogeny is emerging. Nevertheless, the large number of contradicting phylogenies indicates that some fundamental problems have not been discovered or resolved. The international conference “Celebrating Darwin: From The Origin of Species to Deep Metazoan Phylogeny” brings together mathematicians, theorists, molecular systematists, and morphologists interested in a critical review of known pitfalls and in the presentation of new analytical tools, new types of characters, and a synopsis of molecular and morphological characters. It is intended to get a critical and constructive view of the state of the art. On behalf of the organising committee we would like to invite you to this conference, which will take place from 4th - 7th March 2009 at the Humboldt-University and the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, Germany. The meeting will consist of sessions with several invited speakers and open sessions with short presentations. In addition, there will be the possibility to show posters.

The meeting focuses on three major themes:

1) Innovations in analyses of molecular and morphological data

2) Molecular phylogeny: new markers and phylogenomic analyses

3) The indispensability of morphology

The conference is organised by the Priority Program "Deep Metazoan Phylogeny" of the German Science Foundation (DFG). The project is a joint effort of more than 20 participating workgroups bringing together molecular, morphological and bioinformatic expertise with the goal to establish a robust (hopefully) backbone tree of metazoans. Details on the priority project "Deep Metazoan Phylogeny" can be found at: http://www.deep-phylogeny.org/.