My book was titled “Darwinian Agriculture” and I’m using darwinianagriculture.com as a domain. Meanwhile, Jacob Weiner has researched similar topics and often drawn similar conclusions, calling our subdiscipline “evolutionary agroecology.” He and his collaborators, many of them in China, have published a series of experimental papers relevant to the individual-plant-fitness-versus-plant-community-yield tradeoffs we (and others, notably Colin Donald) have hypothesized. Now Weiner and Feng-Min Li are organizing the “First Symposium on Crop Evolutionary Ecology” at China’s Lanzhou University on April 11-12, 2024. 

I’m cutting back on travel, but a remote option is planned, so I hope to present a talk at the symposium. A possible sticking point is a request that I submit passport information, even for a remote talk. I have given many remote talks without providing “identity-theft” information, so I will not agree to this. But I am hoping that “they” — I doubt that this request originated with scientists — will allow me to give the talk anyway. If not, I will post it on YouTube during the symposium.

I’ll keep using “Darwinian agriculture” to make it easy for people to find my work, but Weiner’s term is probably better. If “Newtonian physics” means “physics as it would be without relativity”, does “Darwinian” evolution imply “evolution as it would be without discrete genes”, i.e., with the blending inheritance that Darwin assumed? (I’ve noted earlier that Darwinian and his colleague, Alfred Russell Wallace, who deserves wider recognition, almost discovered particulate inheritance.)