Class
| • | 2. Biological Sciences | [X] |
Subdivision
| • | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | [X] |
| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Bryan C. Clarke | | | Institution: | University of Nottingham | | | Year Elected: | 2003 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1932 | | | Death Date: | February 27, 2014 | | | | | | |
Bryan Clarke had a distinguished career as a leading figure in the genetical study of populations in nature. More than any other he demonstrated the widespread occurence and importance of frequency-dependent selection. This work, both theoretical and empirical and strikingly original, has helped to explain such diverse phenomena as clinal variation in gene frequencies, evolutionary dynamics of parasite-host interactions, speciation mechanisms in snails, and the maintenance of genetic variation in human populations. He gained prominence as an international spokesman for ecological genetics and as advisor to organizations including the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Dr. Clarke served on the faculty of the University of Nottingham since 1971 and became Professor of Genetics Emeritus in 1997. He was awarded the Linnean Society of London's Darwin-Wallace Medal in 2008 and the Royal Society's Darwin Medal in 2010. Bryan Clarke died February 27, 2014, at the age of 81 in Nottingham, UK. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Charles Fleming | | | Year Elected: | 1973 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1916 | | | Death Date: | 9/11/87 | | | | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. William D. Hamilton | | | Institution: | University of Oxford | | | Year Elected: | 1999 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1936 | | | Death Date: | March 7, 2000 | | | | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. J. Steve Jones | | | Institution: | University College London | | | Year Elected: | 2011 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1944 | | | | | | |
Steve Jones is a geneticist whose research, primarily concerned with snails and the light their anatomy can shed on biodiversity and genetics, has led to the publication of over 100 specialist papers. He also does more than his share of university teaching and administration, but his main contribution is in the popularization of science. Jones is one of the best known contemporary writers on evolution, and in 1996 he won the Royal Society’s Michael Faraday Prize “for his numerous, wide ranging contributions to the public understanding of science in areas such as human evolution and variation, race, sex, inherited disease and genetic manipulation through his many broadcasts on radio and television, his lectures, popular science books, and his regular science column in The Daily Telegraph and contributions to other newspaper media.” Jones combines profundity with wit, as the APS members who attended his two lectures in the UK in June/July 2009 can attest. His publications include: The Language of the Genes, 1993; (S. Jones, et al) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, 1994; In the Blood: God, Genes and Destiny, 1997; Almost Like a Whale: The Origin of Species Updated, 1999; Darwin’s Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated, 2000; Y: The Descent of Men, 2003; (with B. Van Loon) Introducing Genetics, 2005; Coral, 2007; and Darwin’s Island, 2009. In addition to the Faraday Prize, he has been awarded the Institute of Biology Charter Medal (2002) and the Thomson Reuters Award of the Zoological Society of London (2009). He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 1971. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2011. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Meave Leakey | | | Institution: | Stony Brook University | | | Year Elected: | 2017 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | | | | |
I have always had an interest in natural history and rocks, a pastime much encouraged by my parents. After completing my Zoology degree at the University of North Wales in 1965, I was invited by Louis Leakey to work at the Tigoni Primate Research Centre outside Nairobi, Kenya. Here, in my limited spare time and under the supervision of the animal mechanics specialist Prof. McNeil Alexander, at the University of North Wales my limited spare time, I studied the forelimbs of modern cercopithecoids in the excellent collections of the research centre. I completed my PhD in 1968. In 1969, I began working with Richard Leakey exploring the extensive area of fossiliferous deposits on the eastern shores of Lake Turkana, northern Kenya, which at that time had never before been prospected for fossils or archaeological remains. The Koobi For a Research Project (KFRP) field research has continued to this day, initially under Richard Leakey, after 1989 under my leadership, and more recently co-led with my daughter Louise. The fifty years of fieldwork in the Turkana Basin, exploring the thousands of square kilometers of exposed fossiliferous sediments for evidence of origins of our past, has resulted in large paleontological collections documenting much of the Neogene, but is particularly well known for laying the foundation of our current knowledge of our own evolutionary past.
Today, together with Louise, I continue to direct the KFRP annual field expeditions. In 1995 the project recovered and named Australopithecus anamensis, the earliest known australopithecine, and the earliest secure evidence of bipedality. In 1999, we discovered and named Kenyanthropus platyops, showing diversity in humanity's past 3.5 million years ago. Sponsored by the National Geographic Society, the KFRP continues to recover new fossils showing diversity in the human family tree even earlier in time. Working with numerous colleagues from many disciplines, I have published widely. I am a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, a Research Professor at Stony Brook University and Director of Field Research at the Turkana Basin Institute (TBI), an interdisciplinary research institute with stations to the east and west of Lake Turkana. In addition to promoting and facilitating research, TBI provides training and research opportunities, and brings employment and development benefits to local communities, while increasing awareness among the local people of their unique prehistoric heritage in this vast area. My awards include: The Academy of Achievements Award, USA in 2004, my election as an Honorary Fellow of the Geological Society of London, 2011, as a Foreign Associate National Academy of Sciences 2013, and as a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences 2013. In 2014, I was awarded the National Geographic Society Hubbard Medal. A large part of my successes are due to the invaluable support and efforts of the hard working KFRP field crew, my many colleagues and my wonderful family.
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Meave Leakey is also the author of The Sediments of Time which was published in 2020. | |
| 6 | Name: | Dr. Leif Andersson | | | Institution: | Uppsala University; Texas A&M University | | | Year Elected: | 2017 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1954 | | | | | | |
Leif Andersson is the world’s leading authority on the genomic study of the origin and selected traits of domestic animals, and for his pioneering work he received the prestigious international Wolf Prize in 2014. He has repeatedly discovered what happens genetically when animal breeders apply artificial selection to domestic animals and choose particular traits for enhancement. These traits include fat deposition in pigs, the color of wattles and skin in chickens, and coat coloration and gait locomotion in horses. Genetic understanding has aided further selection programs. This work is the best modern manifestation of Charles Darwin’s pioneering study of Variation under Domestication. Truly Darwinian in outlook, Leif Andersson has expanded his genomic research program into problems of understanding evolution in nature, including the breeding of Baltic Sea herring, the size of rabbits, the peculiar mating system of a colorful shorebird, and size and shape of the beaks of Darwin’s finches. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2018. | |
| 7 | Name: | Dr. Giuseppe Montalenti | | | Institution: | University of Rome | | | Year Elected: | 1985 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1904 | | | Death Date: | 7/2/90 | | | | |
| 8 | Name: | Dr. Dolph Schluter | | | Institution: | University of British Columbia | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1955 | | | | | | |
Dolph Schluter received his BSc in ecology in 1977 from the University of Guelph, Ontario, and his PhD in 1983 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, under the supervision of Peter R. Grant (elected to APS 1991). For his PhD thesis, Schluter studied ecological mechanisms driving assembly and evolution of island assemblages of Darwin's finch species. He and an assistant spent nearly two years living in a tent on remote and otherwise uninhabited Galápagos islands collecting field data. Schluter’s work on the finches culminated in the first estimates from nature of “adaptive landscapes” (mean fitness functions), which successfully predicted mean beak sizes of Galápagos ground finches on islands. He was able to compare these landscapes to fitness functions from survival data on natural selection, using a method he also pioneered, and to test evolutionary shifts caused by interspecific competition between species. This work was a key component of the long-term study of the Darwin's finches that is regarded as the most successful ever field study of evolution. Schluter obtained a tenure track position at UBC in 1989, where he played a steering role in building one of the world’s strongest research groups in biodiversity science.
Between 1983 and 1990 Schluter studied the evolution of continental bird assemblages, during which he developed methods to estimate convergence between faunas. This work led to a collaboration with R. E. Ricklefs that produced a highly influential coedited volume on global patterns of species diversity (Chicago, 1993). Schluter’s group continued to work on the evolution of the latitudinal gradient in species diversity. They showed, surprisingly, that speciation rates are often as higher or higher in the temperate zone, where few species are present, than in the much more species-rich tropics. This finding has since been confirmed by numerous other researchers.
In the late 1980’s, Schluter initiated work on threespine stickleback fish in BC, which enabled his landmark experimental and comparative studies on mechanisms driving the origin and divergence of new species. This work yielded advances on many significant research problems in adaptive radiation, and his stickleback species pairs have become one of the best-known natural study systems in evolutionary biology. The work inspired many ideas, culminating in his now classic text, "The Ecology of Adaptive Radiation" (Oxford, 2000). His subsequent collaboration with D. Kingsley and C. Peichel led to the discovery of key genes underlying species differences and made the stickleback a “supermodel” for studies of adaptive genetic variation. He continues to work on the ecology and genetics of adaptation and speciation in stickleback.
Research Interests
I investigate recent adaptive radiation, whereby a single ancestor diversifies rapidly into an array of species that inhabit a variety of environments and that differ in traits used to exploit those environments. I am especially interested in the selection pressures that drive the origin of new species, the ecological interactions that lead to the evolution of species differences, the genetic basis of these differences, and the wider impacts of diversification on ecosystems. I addressed these questions initially in field studies of Darwin’s finches, but over recent decades I have developed for study a natural system having many advantages for experimental study, the threespine sticklebacks of fresh water and coastal marine areas of British Columbia. My work has included the quantitative estimation of natural selection surfaces and ancestral traits, the experimental study of species interactions, natural selection and evolution, and the discovery of genes underlying phenotypic differences between populations and species and their fitness consequences. My second interest is the role of evolutionary processes and historical events in the development and maintenance of Earth's major biodiversity gradients. | |
| 9 | Name: | Prof. John Maynard Smith | | | Institution: | University of Sussex | | | Year Elected: | 1980 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1920 | | | Death Date: | April 19, 2004 | | | | |
| 10 | Name: | Dr. Christopher Stringer | | | Institution: | Natural History Museum, London | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
Christopher Stringer is the Research Leader in Human Origins at London's Natural History Museum. He is also co-director of the follow-up Pathways to Ancient Britain project. He earned his Ph.D. in 1974 and his D.Sc. 1990, both from the University of Bristol. He has spent most of his career at the Natural History Museum, first starting as a Researcher in 1973.
Stringer is a leading proponent of the Out-of-Africa theory for the origin and spread of modern humans. Beginning with his seminal 1988 Science paper on the "Genetic and Fossil Evidence for the Origin of Modern Humans" (with Peter Andrews) he has worked with archaeologists, dating specialists and geneticists to further develop and refine our understanding of the evolution of our own species. He has recently formulated a modified version of this model, the Coalescent African Origin model. He carried out significant fieldwork on Neanderthals and since 2001 has directed the "Ancient Human Occupation of Britain" and "Pathways to Ancient Britain" projects, which have produced significant new findings about the spread of hominids into the British Isles. He is also the author of numerous bestselling books on human evolution including Our Human Story (with Louise Humphrey), Britain: One Million Years of the Human Story (with R Dinnis), and Homo Britannicus.
He received the Royal Anthropological Institute's Rivers Memorial Medal in 2004 and the Zoological Society of London's Frink Medal in 2008. Stringer was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2023 New Year Honors for services to the understanding of human evolution. He has been a member of the Royal Society since 2004 and is a member of the Society of Antiquaries. Stringer was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. | |
| 11 | Name: | Dr. Phillip V. Tobias | | | Institution: | University of Witwatersrand | | | Year Elected: | 1996 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1925 | | | Death Date: | June 7, 2012 | | | | | | |
Phillip Tobias was one of South Africa's most honoured and decorated scientists and a leading expert on human prehistoric ancestors. His research was mainly in the fields of paleoanthropology and the human biology of African people. He studied the Kalahari San, the Tonga peoples of Zambia and numerous races of Southern Africa. Phillip Tobias was best known for his research on hominid fossils and human evolution, having studied and described hominid fossils from Indonesia, Israel, Kenya, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Zambia. His best known work was on the hominids of East Africa, particularly those of the Olduvai Gorge. Collaborating with Louis Leakey, he identified, described and named the new species Homo habilis. Cambridge University Press published two volumes on the fossils of Homo habilis from the Olduvai Gorge. Dr. Tobias is also closely linked with the archaeological excavation at the Sterkfontein site, a research programme he initiated in 1966.
Dr. Tobias holds B.Sc. (Hons), MBBCh, Ph.D. and D.Sc. Degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand, where he spent his entire student and working career. He chaired the Department of Anatomy and Human Biology for 32 years and served as Professor and Head of Anatomy and Human Biology until his retirement in 1993. He is believed to have taught over 10,000 students during his 50 years at the medical school.
Dr. Tobias published over 600 journal articles and authored or co-authored 33 books and edited or co-edited eight others. He has received honorary degrees from seventeen universities and other academic institutions in South Africa, the United States of America, Canada and Europe. He was elected as a fellow, associate or honorary member of over 28 learned societies. These include being elected a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1996. Among the many medals, awards and prizes he has received are the Balzan International Prize for Physical Anthropology, the Charles R. Darwin Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (1997) and the Walter Sisulu Special Contribution Award (2007) in recognition of his efforts to promote the ideals of the City of Johannesburg.
Because of his renown, Dr. Tobias could have worked just about anywhere, but he chose to stay in South Africa even though he and other researchers there were sometimes shunned by scientists from other countries and barred from international conferences as a show of condemnation of South Africa's apartheid policy, which he, too, opposed. He made fiery anti-apartheid speeches to academic audiences and crowds of demonstrators at the university and said that scientists in particular had to speak out against segregationist policies based on false ideas about racial differences.
Phillip V. Tobias died on June 7, 2012, at the age of 86 in Johannesburg, South Africa. | |
| 12 | Name: | Lord Solly Zuckerman | | | Institution: | Bath Institute of Medical Engineering | | | Year Elected: | 1965 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1904 | | | Death Date: | 4/1/93 | | | | |
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