Evolution of Life

Published: December 2025 · Updated: February 2026

What does it mean that we can now read the genetic instructions for building a human being, but still cannot explain why one species survives and another vanishes? That tension — between molecular knowledge and evolutionary mystery — ran through the entire second edition of The Future of Science, held on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore in September 2006. Sixteen speakers from seven countries. Three days. One of the strongest line-ups the series ever assembled.

Cavalli-Sforza and the genetic atlas of humanity

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza was 84 years old and had spent half a century at Stanford tracing the genetic history of human migration. His 1994 book, The History and Geography of Human Genes — a 1,032-page synthesis of blood group and protein polymorphism data from populations on every continent — remained the definitive work. At Venice he presented an updated picture: how cheap DNA sequencing was revealing migration patterns that blood groups alone could never resolve. The Bantu expansion across sub-Saharan Africa. The settlement of Polynesia. The genetic bottleneck that separated European from East Asian populations roughly 40,000 years ago. He spoke without slides for the first twenty minutes. He didn’t need them.

Cavalli-Sforza died in 2018 at the age of 96. The Venice talk was one of his last major public appearances outside Stanford.

Dennett on Darwin’s dangerous idea

Daniel Dennett, the Tufts philosopher, had published Darwin’s Dangerous Idea in 1995 and Consciousness Explained in 1991 — two books that made him, alongside Richard Dawkins, one of the most prominent public advocates for evolutionary thinking in the English-speaking world. In Venice he argued that Darwinian logic extends far beyond biology: it is, he said, “the single best idea anyone has ever had,” because it shows how design can emerge without a designer. This was not just philosophy. It was a direct challenge to the intelligent design movement, which in 2006 was still fighting court battles in the United States (the Dover ruling had come down just nine months earlier, in December 2005).

Dennett died in April 2024. He was 82.

The other speakers

Peter Atkins, the Oxford physical chemist known equally for his widely used textbook Physical Chemistry (now in its twelfth edition) and his popular writings on thermodynamics, took the chemistry angle: how does order emerge from disorder? What thermodynamic arrow drives atoms to assemble into cells, cells into organisms, organisms into ecosystems? Atkins was born in 1940 and had spent his career making the case that chemistry, not biology, is where the real explanatory action is. Venice gave him a stage for that argument.

Denis Duboule (EPFL and Université de Genève) presented his research on Hox genes — the master switches that control body plan development across species from fruit flies to humans. The conservation of Hox gene clusters across 600 million years of evolution is one of the most striking facts in all of biology, and Duboule had spent two decades working out the regulatory mechanisms. His Venice talk connected developmental genetics to the broader evolutionary story: same toolkit, vastly different outcomes.

Ian Tattersall, curator emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and author of The Fossil Trail (1995), offered the paleoanthropological perspective. His argument, honed over decades of studying hominin fossils, was that Homo sapiens is not the inevitable endpoint of a linear progression but one surviving branch of a once-diverse bush. We are here. The Neanderthals, the Denisovans, Homo floresiensis — they are not. The reasons are more contingent than most people want to admit.

The central question

The most contentious panel — we gather this from the published daily reports by Ideum, the digital media studio that documented the conference in detail — addressed whether modern medicine is altering natural selection. If we can treat genetic conditions that would once have been lethal, are we changing the evolutionary trajectory of the species? And if gene editing becomes routine (CRISPR was then still obscure, three years from Jennifer Doudna’s landmark paper), will evolution itself become a matter of human choice?

There was no consensus. There rarely is at the best conferences.

Aftermath

The 2006 edition confirmed what the first conference had suggested: Venice worked as a venue for this kind of conversation. The series would continue for another decade, through energy, food, DNA, viruses, the mind, nanoscience, longevity, hunger, precision medicine, and finally the digital revolution in 2016. But several attendees we’ve spoken with recall the 2006 edition as the strongest in terms of pure intellectual firepower. Cavalli-Sforza, Dennett, Tattersall, Duboule, Atkins — all in the same room, all disagreeing productively. That does not happen often.