Armand Marie Leroi

Last updated

Armand Leroi
Born (1964-07-16) 16 July 1964 (age 60)
Wellington, New Zealand
Nationality
  • New Zealand
  • Dutch
Alma mater
Scientific career
Fields Evolutionary biology
Institutions
Thesis The origin and evolution of life history trade-offs  (1993)
Doctoral advisor Michael R. Rose [1]
Website www3.imperial.ac.uk/people/a.leroi

Armand Marie Leroi (born 16 July 1964) [2] is a New Zealand-born Dutch author, broadcaster, and professor of evolutionary developmental biology at Imperial College in London. [3] [4] [5] He received the Guardian First Book Award in 2004 for his book Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body. He has presented scientific documentaries on Channel 4 such as Alien Worlds (2005) and What Makes Us Human (2006), and BBC Four such as What Darwin Didn't Know (2009), Aristotle's Lagoon (2010), and Secret Science of Pop (2012).

Contents

Early life and education

A Dutch citizen, Leroi was born in Wellington, New Zealand. His youth was spent in New Zealand, South Africa and Canada. He was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree by Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada in 1989, and a Ph.D. by the University of California, Irvine in 1993. [1] This was followed by postdoctoral work at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York City using the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as an experimental organism. [6] [7]

Career

In 2001, Leroi was appointed lecturer at Imperial College, London. He has written several books, including Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body. [8] [9] In 2004 he adapted his book into a television documentary series for Britain's Channel 4 entitled Human Mutants. [10]

Leroi has presented two other TV documentary series for Channel 4: Alien Worlds in 2005, and What Makes Us Human in 2006. Despite his TV appearances, Leroi has expressed scepticism about the truthfulness of television creatives. In an email exchange with TV director Martin Durkin, concerning the latter's documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle , Leroi wrote: "left to their own devices, TV producers simply cannot be trusted to tell the truth". [11]

He is also known as one of the first testers of the beneficial acclimation hypothesis. In 2005, Leroi published an article in The New York Times entitled "A Family Tree in Every Gene", which argued for the usefulness of racial types in medical genetics. [12]

In January 2009 Leroi presented the BBC4 documentary What Darwin Didn't Know , which charts the progress in the field of Evolutionary Theory since the original publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. [13]

In January 2010 Leroi presented the BBC4 documentary Aristotle's Lagoon, filmed on the Greek island of Lesbos and suggesting that Aristotle was the world's first biologist. [2] The documentary account was expanded in his 2014 book The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science. [14] [15] He accepted Aristotle as his "scientific hero", describing: "His genius was simply to invent biology." [6]

Leroi collaborated on the DarwinTunes evolutionary music project, using natural selection to create music. [16] The research findings explained how music choice evolved in the pattern of Charles Darwin's natural selection. [17] The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012. [18] Leroi's research team also analysed the musical properties of the US Billboard Hot 100 between 1960 and 2010, and found that popular music emerged in three stylistic revolutions around 1964, 1983 and 1991. The study was published in the Royal Society Open Science in 2015. [19] Explaining the contributions of The Beatles to the evolution of music, he said, "They're not making that [1964] revolution, they're joining it. [20] In 2016, he presented The Secret Science of Pop on BBC4. [21]

Awards and honours

Leroi received the EMBO Award for Communication in the Life Sciences of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in 2006. [22] In 2004, he won the Guardian First Book Award for Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body. [23] [24] He was awarded the 2014 JBS Haldane Lecture of The Genetics Society. [25] The same year he received the London Hellenic Prize of the Hellenic Centre for The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science. [26]

Books

Related Research Articles

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Evolution</span> Change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Natural selection</span> Mechanism of evolution by differential survival and reproduction of individuals

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Evolutionary developmental biology is a field of biological research that compares the developmental processes of different organisms to infer how developmental processes evolved.

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DarwinTunes was a research project into the use of natural selection to create music led by Bob MacCallum and Armand Leroi, scientists at Imperial College London. The project asks volunteers on the Internet to listen to automatically generated sound loops and rate them based on aesthetic preference. After the volunteers rate the loops on a five-point scale, software permits the highest rated loops to 'reproduce sexually' and populate the next generation of musical loops.

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References

  1. 1 2 Leroi, Armand (1993). The origin and evolution of life history trade-offs (PhD thesis). University of California Irvine. ProQuest   304049779.
  2. 1 2 "Professor Armand Leroi". Knight Ayton Management. Archived from the original on 24 October 2013. Retrieved 30 July 2014.
  3. ↑ Chippindale, Adam K.; Leroi, Armand M.; Kim, Sung B.; Rose, Michael R. (1993). "Phenotypic plasticity and selection in Drosophila life-history evolution. I. Nutrition and the cost of reproduction". Journal of Evolutionary Biology. 6 (2): 171–193. doi: 10.1046/j.1420-9101.1993.6020171.x . S2CID   44697297.
  4. ↑ Leroi, A. M.; Bennett, A. F.; Lenski, R. E. (1994). "Temperature acclimation and competitive fitness: an experimental test of the beneficial acclimation assumption". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 91 (5): 1917–1921. Bibcode:1994PNAS...91.1917L. doi: 10.1073/pnas.91.5.1917 . PMC   43275 . PMID   8127906.
  5. ↑ Lauder, George V.; Leroi, Armand M.; Rose, Michael R. (1993). "Adaptations and history". Trends in Ecology & Evolution. 8 (8): 294–297. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.378.1893 . doi:10.1016/0169-5347(93)90258-Q. PMID   21236172.
  6. 1 2 Leroi, Armand (2007). "Armand Leroi". Current Biology. 17 (16): R619–R620. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2007.06.006 . PMID   17855851. S2CID   8502037.
  7. ↑ Flemming, Anthony J.; Shen, Zai-Zhong; Cunha, Ana; Emmons, Scott W.; Leroi, Armand M. (2000). "Somatic polyploidization and cellular proliferation drive body size evolution in nematodes". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 97 (10): 5285–5290. Bibcode:2000PNAS...97.5285F. doi: 10.1073/pnas.97.10.5285 . PMC   25820 . PMID   10805788.
  8. ↑ Armand Marie Leroi (2005). Mutants: on the form, varieties and errors of the human body. New York, N.Y: Harper Perennial. ISBN   978-0-00-653164-7.
  9. ↑ "Mutants by Armand Marie Leroi - Reviews - Books". The Independent. 22 June 2004. Retrieved 21 February 2013.
  10. ↑ Armand Leroi at IMDb
  11. ↑ "durkinemails.htm". Ocean.mit.edu. 9 March 2007. Retrieved 21 February 2013.
  12. ↑ The New York Times, retrieved 2009-09-30
  13. ↑ "BBC Four - What Darwin Didn't Know". BBC. Retrieved 30 October 2022.
  14. ↑ Williams, Nigel (2010). "Aristotle's lagoon". Current Biology. 20 (3): R84–R85. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2010.01.032 . S2CID   26700862.
  15. ↑ Goldstein, Rebecca Newberger (31 October 2014). "'The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science,' by Armand Marie Leroi". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 30 October 2022.
  16. ↑ MacCallum, R. M.; Mauch, M.; Burt, A.; Leroi, A. M. (2012). "Evolution of music by public choice". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 109 (30): 12081–12086. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1203182109 . PMC   3409751 . PMID   22711832.
  17. ↑ London, Imperial College. "On the origin of music by means of natural selection". phys.org. Retrieved 31 October 2022.
  18. ↑ MacCallum, Robert M.; Mauch, Matthias; Burt, Austin; Leroi, Armand M. (24 July 2012). "Evolution of music by public choice". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 109 (30): 12081–12086. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1203182109 . ISSN   1091-6490. PMC   3409751 . PMID   22711832.
  19. ↑ Mauch, Matthias; MacCallum, Robert M.; Levy, Mark; Leroi, Armand M. (2015). "The evolution of popular music: USA 1960-2010". Royal Society Open Science. 2 (5): 150081. arXiv: 1502.05417 . Bibcode:2015RSOS....250081M. doi:10.1098/rsos.150081. ISSN   2054-5703. PMC   4453253 . PMID   26064663.
  20. ↑ Smith, Carl (17 December 2017). "'Relentlessly average': Evolutionary biology suggests The Beatles 'weren't musically important'". ABC News. Retrieved 31 October 2022.
  21. ↑ "BBC Four - The Secret Science of Pop". BBC. Retrieved 30 October 2022.
  22. ↑ "EMBO honors triple talents of UK scientist, author, broadcaster". EurekAlert!. Retrieved 31 October 2022.
  23. 1 2 Pauli, Michelle (1 December 2004). "Guardian First Book award goes to biology lecturer". The Guardian. Retrieved 30 October 2022.
  24. ↑ Guardian Staff (30 November 2004). "Armand Marie Leroi wins the Guardian First Book Award 2004". the Guardian. Retrieved 30 October 2022.
  25. ↑ "JBS Haldane Lecture 2014 - Armand Leroi". Genetics Society. Retrieved 31 October 2022.
  26. ↑ "Past Winners". London Hellenic Prize 01. Retrieved 31 October 2022.
  27. ↑ Gee, Henry (2 October 2014). "The Lagoon: How Aristotle invented science by Armand Marie Leroi – review". The Guardian. Retrieved 30 October 2022.
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