Hi everyone.

Today I will be the chairperson.

Enrique unfortunately couldn't make it due

to the strike.

Enrique is not on strike.

It's the Nürburgring buses who are.

But yeah,

it will follow online.

So today it's my pleasure to introduce Professor Anna Kocko.

She is

currently Umbolt professor in Mines in evolutionary ecology, right?

Since three years.

She actually

has been here already.

She gave a very interesting talk about the emergence of sex in biology.

And today actually she will tell us about how desirable it is to have a long life

evolutionary

speaking. So I guess I can give you the floor now.

Thank you so much.

Yes, so indeed it's already the second time that I'm giving a talk here.

And I guess the reasoning is that first time I promised to talk about sex and death.

But

then there was so much to talk about sex that I didn't have time to talk about death. So

then I was invited again to talk about death things. And of course the long life is relevant

because no matter how long the life is at some point death will intervene. And to make

you think about this.

So I am somebody who thinks about diversity of life, not just about

human biology, but about all kinds of organisms.

So here's in the aging biology field.

This

is a very famous pair of photos. I took it from a textbook where you can see a young

man holding a sea bird.

And here's the old man, the same man, much later holding or trying

to hold a sea bird. And it's also the same bird, same individual bird. And we know that

because they have been marked. And as you can see here, the donnet, that's the name of the guy,

he looks totally different.

He has aged in the intervening 42 years, but the bird looks just

like the same. And of course, this is a bit of a cheeky example, because birds with their feathers,

they don't, it's not easy to tell their age.

If you look at some biomolecular markers in their blood,

you might see some signs of aging.

But it actually is true that if you compare it to the same body

size birds and mammals, the bird probably lives longer. And this is kind of like, you know,

these sort of differences, what fascinates me. I also work on organisms that don't really live

long at all.

So there's, I think right now is quite close to full moon.

And this is a midge species

that lives on the European coasts.

And it only emerges at new moon or full moon.

In between,