Biography:

Jonathan is Professor of Ecology at The Open University, which is the largest university in Britain with 200, 000 students. He read for a degree in Biological Sciences at the University of Sussex and was inspired there by Prof. John Maynard Smith, perhaps the pre-eminent evolutionary biologist of the 20th Century. Ever since, he has viewed the natural world through a Darwinian lens. After his first degree, Jonathan stayed on at Sussex to do postgraduate research with the aim of discovering why the famous chalk grasslands of the South Downs are so rich in plant species. Explaining this diversity is a fascinating challenge to any Darwinist because you would expect the struggle for existence of which Darwin wrote to result in just one or two species succeeding at the expense of all the rest. Why this doesnt usually happen and why, therefore, the natural world is so richly-stocked with plants is explored in Jonathans popular book Demons in Eden (Chicago University Press, 2008). It is also the question that motivates Jonathans current research into plant diversity in the Cape Floristic Region of South Africa where he and his colleagues have recently discovered how plant communities there are put together and how they have evolved. Other ongoing projects include the Evolution MegaLab (www.evolutionmegalab.org), and iSpot, a social networking website for natural history ( ). His latest book is An Orchard Invisible: a natural history of seeds. Details of these and other projects may be found at www.jonathansilvertown.com

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