Dr. Jordan Okie | Okie Additional Information
Biosketch:
Jordan Okie is a research professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. Motivated by a variety of field experiences spanning the extremes of life and its environments, his research aims to understand patterns of biodiversity, scaling, metabolism and macroevolution across levels of organization, from tiny prokaryotes to giant multicellular organisms, ecosystems, colonies and technological systems. His research combines mathematical theory and modeling, bioinformatics, microbial experiments and the compilation and analysis of comparative data sets. He is also concerned with issues of Anthropocene ecology and sustainability, authoring a book and widely-cited papers on these topics. Recent notable papers include work on the rarity of prokaryote endosymbioses, genomic adaptations in whole-ecosystem experiments and the development of the Equilibrium Theory of Biodiversity Dynamics.
He earned a Ph.D. in biology from the University of New Mexico in 2011 and has held fellowships and visiting appointments with NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, the Czech Science Foundation’s Center for Theoretical Study and the Santa Fe Institute. He joined the faculty at ASU in 2015 and teaches courses on astrobiology, biogeochemistry and ecology.
Abstract:
The diversity, size and complexity of living things on Earth today vary widely across the globe, following some general patterns of distribution whose underlying mechanisms remain hotly contested. The evolution of the largest and most complex living things required some 3.8 billion years and massive amounts of energy.
This seminar will explore the general ecological, evolutionary, physiological and genomic factors limiting and shaping this extraordinary biological variation across space and time. The seminar will present theory, experiments and comparative analyses revealing the role of biological innovations, including evolutionary transitions in individuality in facilitating the evolution of larger-bodied living things.
The seminar will cover work on metabolic scaling, metabolic modeling, metagenomics and biodiversity theory that sheds light on the role of energetic constraints in shaping the distribution and evolution of the biodiversity, body size and hierarchical complexity of living things, from prokaryotes to single-celled eukaryotes, complex endosymbioses, multicellular organisms, holobionts, superorganisms and technological systems.