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The Stamford Raffles lecture

The Stamford Raffles Lecture is the foremost event in our annual programme of scientific meetings. Established in 1995, the lectures have been given by eminent speakers on a wide range of zoological topics.

Stamford Raffles
© James Lonsdale ZSL

2008

Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University "common wealth: economics for a crowded planet"

At the 2008 Stamford Raffles Lecture, Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs will discuss the challenges of sustainable development in the 21st century. He will outline an approach to achieve four global goals by 2050:

Sustainable systems of energy, land and resource use
Stabilization of the world’s population at eight billion or below
The end of extreme poverty by 2025
A new approach to global problem solving

He brings to these issues his experience as the Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, Special Advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General, former Director of the UN Millennium Project, economic advisor to developing countries around the world and President of the Millennium Promise Alliance.

2007

Steve Jones PhD, Professor of Genetics at University College London
"is man just another animal?"

The completion of the human and chimpanzee genome sequences was a triumph of comparative anatomy. It proved (as if any biologist doubted it) Darwin's contention in The Descent of Man that "Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin". I will talk about the similarities - and the differences - between our own DNA and that of our relatives and about what that tells us about our own taxonomic position as medium-sized mammals.

More importantly, I will try to go beyond comparative anatomy to ask whether that science helps us to understand what we are as human beings, rather than merely as rather unspecialised primates. Gilbert and Sullivan once claimed that "Darwinian man, though well behaved, at best is only a monkey shaved". I will ask how right, or otherwise, they may have been.

2006

Professor Sir John Lawton CBE FRS Chair of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and former Chief Executive of the Natural Environment Research Council
"biodiversity, climate change and unsustainable development"

Life on planet Earth is now facing the sixth mass extinction. Conservation biologists are in the front line trying to stem the tide, and the lecture will explore the mechanisms they have put in place, or plan to develop, to achieve the target of slowing down and if possible halting the loss of biodiversity by 2010. But the problem is not simply a biological one. The looming mass extinction goes to the heart of the sustainable development debate, made worse by the threat of human-induced climate change. Put starkly, the accelerating loss of biodiversity points to the unsustainability of the human enterprise in its present form, and the long-term solutions lie well outside the realms of conservation biology, in a socially fairer world that seeks to massively reduce human use of the planet's resources.

2005

Adam Hart-Davis
"stuffed, mummified and pickled: the work of some outstanding early naturalists"

Throughout history animals have stimulated inspiration and curiosity. The ancient Egyptians worshipped and mummified cats, Aristotle made extraordinary observations on the development of chicken embryos, and Wild Bill Buckland, Reader in Geology at the University of Oxford, boasted that he had eaten his way through most of the animal kingdom.

In this talk, writer, photographer and broadcaster Adam Hart-Davis will serve up an eclectic dish of animal enthusiasts, from 17th century microscopists Robert Hooke and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek to 18th century proto-environmentalists Gilbert White and Charles Waterton, the man who wrestled with a crocodile and shared a house with a colony of vampire bats. Dr Hart-Davis will unravel the reasons why Wild Bill Buckland strutted about during his lectures at Oxford and crawled around in mud in a cave in Yorkshire. He will tell of Charles Darwin's discovery that earthworms are intelligent despite being deaf to the bassoon, and of John Stringfellow's and George Cayley's respective studies of rooks and crows. He will also explain why the world has beaten a path to the door of Colin Pullinger, Clerk to the Selsey Sparrow Club.

2004

Sir David Attenborough CH. FRS
"bird artists and artist birds: plumes and bowers in New Guinea"

When the first specimens of birds of paradise reached Europe in the sixteenth century, the plumes seemed so extraordinary that scholars readily believed the stories that the birds lived in paradise and only fell to earth when they died. As skins of more species became known, so ornithological illustrators struggled to picture the living birds, sometimes with very strange results. It was not until the end of the last century that the extraordinary displays of many of these wonderful species became known to science. But why should this amazing varied family have evolved such an unparalleled range and extravagance of courtship behaviour? Another group of birds in New Guinea, the bowerbirds, may suggest an answer.

2003

Steven Sanderson President & Chief Executive Officer Wildlife Conservation Society, USA
"the contemporary experience of wild nature and its implications for conservation"

Most of the world does not experience wild nature directly. Cultural institutions, including both zoological gardens and wildlife parks, mediate that experience and shape the way we view and value nature in the new millennium. Our ability to connect the well-being of living collections of animals with global wildlife conservation is critical to the survival of wild nature and to its cultural value to our world. Shaping the future of a progressive zoo-conservation connection is the subject of this lecture.

2002

Professor Richard A. Fortey, FRS The Natural History Museum and Oxford University
"the natural history of trilobites"

Although they have been extinct for 250 million years we know a surprising amount about how these 'beetles of the Palaeozoic' lived in the ancient oceans. We know how they saw through their eyes made of rock crystal. We know that some giant eyed species lived as part of the plankton, while others were hunters or filter feeders living on the sea floor. We know how they bred and grew from larvae to adults. We can infer how they related to the geography of continents which were arranged quite differently from those of today. This lecture will explore the ways that palaeontololgists can bring long dead animals 'back to life'.

2001

Professor Lewis Wolpert, CBE, FRS Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology, University College London
"embryonic development - from the egg to five fingers"

How a single cell can develop into an animal is the triumph of developmental biology. Genes control how the cells in the embryo behave by putting proteins in the right cells at the right time. One key process involves pattern formation in which the cells acquire a sense of their position which determines how they behave. These processes are remarkably similar in flies and humans.

2000

Professor Susan Greenfield Director, The Royal Institution of Great Britain
"chemicals and consciousness - how the brain generates consciousness"

Consciousness is now attracting the attention of scientists as well as philosophers. Although many physicists and mathematicians anxious to model consciousness in artificial systems have been quite vociferous, there is a need to understand consciousness in a way that caters for the diverse range of chemicals operating in the brain; how else might one explain the various mood modifying and consciousness changing effects of specific drugs?

1999

Roy Anderson FRS Linacre Professor of Zoology and Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the Epidemiology of Infectious Disease, University of Oxford
"the BSE crisis and the emerging epidemic of new variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease"