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CORVALLIS - Mark Seielstad, a population geneticist and evolutionary biologist from Harvard University, will give a lecture on Thursday, Feb. 28, at Oregon State University that will look at genetic variation and human survival.

His lecture, "Genetic Archaeology and the Impact of Culture on Human Variation," will begin at 4 p.m. in OSU's Memorial Union Room 206. It is free and open to the public.

A professor in Harvard's School of Public Health, Seielstad has combined his studies of mutation rates in maternal and paternal DNA with field studies of population distribution to trace prehistoric migration out of Africa. In his lecture, Seielstad will argue that the amount of genetic variation in the human species is "vanishingly" small, suggesting that what has saved us from extinction has been our original and continuing capacity for culture.

As part of his studies, Seielstad has looked at differential migration patterns in males and females as a way of understanding the interrelationship of culture and biology at that early period of human development.

Seielstad majored in classic literature at Stanford University, then got his doctorate in organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard. He has received a Research Career Award from the National Human Genome Research Institute and is spending the year as a visiting professor in the Institute of Endemic Diseases at the University of Khartoum.

As part of his research, Seielstad has conducted fieldwork in the Sudan, Ethiopia, Thailand and Vietnam. The OSU lecture is sponsored by the university's Horning Endowment for the Humanities.