Most Influential Evolutionary Biologist

[CDarwin]

The second thread in the series. Who do you think is the most influential evolutionary biologist living today?

 

We're defining that as who's had the greatest impact on the field in his or her lifetime... I think. If anyone wants to offer another definition and propose people to fit it, you're welcome.

 

I suppose we also have to deal with "what is an evolutionary biologist?" I think it would be safe to include paleontologists and evolutionary anthropologists in on top of your typical population geneticists and proper 'biologists' as long as they've made contributions to evolutionary theory per se. Obviously most every biologists is an 'evolutionary' biologists in that they all work with evolution as a paradigm. I think you get what I mean.

 

I'm also going to hazard a name here in that I think I'm at least casually familiar with this field: Niles Eldredge?

[PhDP]

James F. Crow, not only because of his works, but also because of his influence on many of the greatest thinkers in evolutionary biology.

 

Niles Eldredge made some interesting contributions, but again, he's mostly known because of Gould and some books he wrote for the laypeople, you can't compare him to a giant like Crow. There's a sharp distinction between science and science popularization.

[CDarwin]

James F. Crow, not only because of his works, but also because of his influence on many of the greatest thinkers in evolutionary biology.

 

But what about all the people he denied franchise too?

 

You know, if we're going to go back to guys born in 1916, maybe it might be more valid to just ask the most influential evolutionary biologist of the 20th Century?

[Mr Skeptic]

The way you phrase it it sounds like you are restricting the field of study to things relating to evolution. Did you simply mean who is the most influential biologist?

[CDarwin]

The way you phrase it it sounds like you are restricting the field of study to things relating to evolution. Did you simply mean who is the most influential biologist?

 

No, I tried to specifically clear that up by asking for researchers that "contributed to evolutionary theory per se." I guess I wasn't very lucid on that.

[PhDP]

Evolutionary biology is too vast; Fisher, Haldane, Wright, Morgan, Hamilton, Williams, Lewontin, Price, Maynard Smith, Kimura, Crow, Wilson, Felsenstein, Lynch, Nei, they all made very important contributions, it's really hard to say which one had the greatest influence.

 

If I had to choose, I would say either Fisher or Wright the first part of the century, and either Kimura or Hamilton for the second part of the century. But for Fisher... it's complicated, on one hand, his contribution is impressive, on the other hand, his understanding of evolution was often primitive. Also, most of his work was not really about discovering new things but about making a true science out of Darwin's work.

[Mr Skeptic]

No, I tried to specifically clear that up by asking for researchers that "contributed to evolutionary theory per se." I guess I wasn't very lucid on that.

 

Huh. I missed that.

 

I'd cast my vote for whoever was in charge of the Human Genome Project. I think gene sequencing is the future for evolution study.

[CDarwin]

Huh. I missed that.

 

I'd cast my vote for whoever was in charge of the Human Genome Project. I think gene sequencing is the future for evolution study.

 

A. I think you mean James Watson and

B. I hope not.

 

Evolutionary biology is too vast; Fisher, Haldane, Wright, Morgan, Hamilton, Williams, Lewontin, Price, Maynard Smith, Kimura, Crow, Wilson, Felsenstein, Lynch, Nei, they all made very important contributions, it's really hard to say which one had the greatest influence.

 

If I had to choose, I would say either Fisher or Wright the first part of the century, and either Kimura or Hamilton for the second part of the century. But for Fisher... it's complicated, on one hand, his contribution is impressive, on the other hand, his understanding of evolution was often primitive. Also, most of his work was not really about discovering new things but about making a true science out of Darwin's work.

 

Maybe we should go back to living, then...

[PhDP]

Maybe we should go back to living, then...

 

James F. Crow, then

 

But I'm probably wrong about this. The fact is, evolution is a complicated subject, many evolutionary biologists have done a lot, for example Joseph Felsenstein, Michael Lynch or Masatoshi Nei, but we won't be able to really evaluate their contribution until a few years.

 

Also, there's a lot of evolutionary scientists. Science is increasingly about groups, cooperation and subsubsubspecialization, making these kind of question very hard to answer.

[lucaspa]

You limited this to "living". Unfortunately, Gould, Ernst Mayr,and John Maynard Smith died recently. So the giants of the Modern Synthesis are gone. Eldredge is a good nominee. So is Francisco Ayala.

 

I can't agree with Crow. Mostly because so many of the claims of Neutral Theory have been shown to be wrong. He and Kimura proposed an interesting theory, but it turns out that nearly every locus is under natural selection and does not correspond to Neutral Theory.

[PhDP]

CDarwin; after reading a lot about the early history of evolution, I have to say I think the greatest evolutionary biologist was S. Wright. About "modern" evoltunary biologists, I continue to think it's impossible to say, not because they're all trivial, but there's just too many of them; Michael Lynch, Russel Lande Sarah Otto, John Gillespie, Masatoshi Nei, Felsenstein, Kingman, Ohta...

 

lucaspa;

 

Surely, we don't live in the same universe.

 

Of course, you could quote about a dozen articles supporting the notion that selection is the most powerful force. And I could do the same for drift. In Li's molecular evolution, he says (I'm paraphrasing) that we'll continue to hear people saying the neutral theory is dead, and some will claim it has won the debate.

 

There's simply no clear resolution to the neutral theory, it's very clear that Fisher's view of evolution is losing ground to Wright's view (it terms of dominance, the size of mutations, the shape of the adaptive landscpace, the impact of drift), but we still don't know exactly how much of evolution is neutral/nearly-neutral.

 

It must, however, be obvious to anyone with basic knowledge of evolutionary biology that both orthodox neutralism and panselectionism represent extremes which ought to be rejected.

 

It's also clear to me that you don't understand well what 'drift' is. You claimed that drift could not work with N > 50. It's just total nonsense, there's absolutely no population limit to drift. If a mutant has no effect on fitness, its fate will be determined by drift even if the population size is nearly infinite. The chance of fixation of a mutant is both influenced by population size and by the selection coefficient (of course, other factors can be included). After a rapid and drastic change in the environment, strong selection is expected to act, but most populations in the wild are not subjected to strong selection, so drift will tend to be a very important force.