Daniel J. Fairbanks | |
|---|---|
 Fairbanks in 2023 | |
| Born | 1956 (age 67–68) |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation(s) | Biologist, professor |
Daniel Justin Fairbanks (born 1956) [1] is an American biologist who was formerly a dean of Undergraduate Education at Brigham Young University (BYU). He is a specialist in biology who has written books on the subject.
Fairbanks is a great-grandson of John B. Fairbanks, an artist from Utah. Fairbanks received his undergraduate education at BYU. As a young man he served as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church).
Fairbanks has been on the faculty of BYU since 1988. Besides being a biology professor he has served as head of the University Honors Program and associate dean of General Education and Honors.
Fairbanks has also served as a visiting professor at Universidade Estadual de Londrina and Southern Virginia University.
Fairbanks is also a sculptor who has works in some museum collections.
Fairbanks is currently Dean of the College of Health and Science at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.
Fairbanks is also an author. Some of his works include Genetics: The Continunity of Life, Relics of Eden: The Powerful Evidence of Evolution in Human DNA, a very accessible book for non-specialist in genetics readers, [2] Ending the Mendel-Fisher Controversy, and Shrubland Ecosystem Genetics and Biodiversity: Proceedings of a Conference.
Genetics is the study of genes, genetic variation, and heredity in organisms. It is an important branch in biology because heredity is vital to organisms' evolution. Gregor Mendel, a Moravian Augustinian friar working in the 19th century in Brno, was the first to study genetics scientifically. Mendel studied "trait inheritance", patterns in the way traits are handed down from parents to offspring over time. He observed that organisms inherit traits by way of discrete "units of inheritance". This term, still used today, is a somewhat ambiguous definition of what is referred to as a gene.
Gregor Johann MendelOSA was an Austrian-Czech biologist, meteorologist, mathematician, Augustinian friar and abbot of St. Thomas' Abbey in Brno (Brünn), Margraviate of Moravia. Mendel was born in a German-speaking family in the Silesian part of the Austrian Empire and gained posthumous recognition as the founder of the modern science of genetics. Though farmers had known for millennia that crossbreeding of animals and plants could favor certain desirable traits, Mendel's pea plant experiments conducted between 1856 and 1863 established many of the rules of heredity, now referred to as the laws of Mendelian inheritance.
Heredity, also called inheritance or biological inheritance, is the passing on of traits from parents to their offspring; either through asexual reproduction or sexual reproduction, the offspring cells or organisms acquire the genetic information of their parents. Through heredity, variations between individuals can accumulate and cause species to evolve by natural selection. The study of heredity in biology is genetics.
Mendelian inheritance is a type of biological inheritance following the principles originally proposed by Gregor Mendel in 1865 and 1866, re-discovered in 1900 by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns, and later popularized by William Bateson. These principles were initially controversial. When Mendel's theories were integrated with the Boveri–Sutton chromosome theory of inheritance by Thomas Hunt Morgan in 1915, they became the core of classical genetics. Ronald Fisher combined these ideas with the theory of natural selection in his 1930 book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, putting evolution onto a mathematical footing and forming the basis for population genetics within the modern evolutionary synthesis.
The modern synthesis was the early 20th-century synthesis of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and Gregor Mendel's ideas on heredity into a joint mathematical framework. Julian Huxley coined the term in his 1942 book, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. The synthesis combined the ideas of natural selection, Mendelian genetics, and population genetics. It also related the broad-scale macroevolution seen by palaeontologists to the small-scale microevolution of local populations.
Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher was a British polymath who was active as a mathematician, statistician, biologist, geneticist, and academic. For his work in statistics, he has been described as "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science" and "the single most important figure in 20th century statistics". In genetics, Fisher was the one to most comprehensively combine the ideas of Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin, as his work used mathematics to combine Mendelian genetics and natural selection; this contributed to the revival of Darwinism in the early 20th-century revision of the theory of evolution known as the modern synthesis. For his contributions to biology, Richard Dawkins declared Fisher to be the greatest of Darwin's successors. He is also considered one of the founding fathers of Neo-Darwinism. According to statistician Jeffrey T. Leek, Fisher is the most influential scientist of all time based off the number of citations of his contributions.
Genetic variation is the difference in DNA among individuals or the differences between populations among the same species. The multiple sources of genetic variation include mutation and genetic recombination. Mutations are the ultimate sources of genetic variation, but other mechanisms, such as genetic drift, contribute to it, as well.
The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection is a book by Ronald Fisher which combines Mendelian genetics with Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, with Fisher being the first to argue that "Mendelism therefore validates Darwinism" and stating with regard to mutations that "The vast majority of large mutations are deleterious; small mutations are both far more frequent and more likely to be useful", thus refuting orthogenesis. First published in 1930 by The Clarendon Press, it is one of the most important books of the modern synthesis, and helped define population genetics. It had been described by J. F. Crow as the "deepest book on evolution since Darwin".
This is a list of topics in evolutionary biology.
The history of genetics dates from the classical era with contributions by Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Aristotle, Epicurus, and others. Modern genetics began with the work of the Augustinian friar Gregor Johann Mendel. His works on pea plants, published in 1866, provided the initial evidence that, on its rediscovery in 1900's, helped to establish the theory of Mendelian inheritance.
Anthony William Fairbank Edwards, FRS is a British statistician, geneticist and evolutionary biologist. Edwards is regarded as one of Britain's most distinguished geneticists, and as one of the most influential mathematical geneticists in the history. He is the son of the surgeon Harold C. Edwards, and brother of medical geneticist John H. Edwards. Edwards has sometimes been called "Fisher's Edwards" to distinguish him from his brother, because he was mentored by Ronald Fisher. He has always had a high regard for Fisher's scientific contributions and has written extensively on them. To mark the Fisher centenary in 1990, Edwards proposed a commemorative Sir Ronald Fisher window be installed in the Dining Hall of Gonville & Caius College. When the window was removed in 2020, he vigorously opposed the move.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to genetics:
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints takes no official position on whether or not biological evolution has occurred, nor on the validity of the modern evolutionary synthesis as a scientific theory. In the twentieth century, the First Presidency of the LDS Church published doctrinal statements on the origin of man and creation. In addition, individual leaders of the church have expressed a variety of personal opinions on evolution, many of which have affected the beliefs and perceptions of Latter-day Saints.
The College of Natural Science (NatSci) at Michigan State University is home to 27 departments and programs in the biological, physical and mathematical sciences.
Several universities have designed interdisciplinary courses with a focus on human biology at the undergraduate level. There is a wide variation in emphasis ranging from business, social studies, public policy, healthcare and pharmaceutical research.
This bibliography of biology is a list of notable works, organized by subdiscipline, on the subject of biology.
The 1911 modernism controversy at Brigham Young University was an episode involving four professors at Brigham Young University (BYU), who between 1908 and 1911 widely taught evolution and higher criticism of the Bible, arguing that modern scientific thought was compatible with Christian and Mormon theology. The professors were popular among students and the community but their teachings concerned administrators, and drew complaints from stake presidents, eventually resulting in the resignation of all four faculty members, an event that "leveled a serious blow to the academic reputation of Brigham Young University—one from which the Mormon school did not fully recover until successive presidential administrations."
Aspects of genetics including mutation, hybridisation, cloning, genetic engineering, and eugenics have appeared in fiction since the 19th century.
John "Keoni" Sai Keong Kauwe III is an American geneticist and academic administrator serving as the 11th president of Brigham Young University–Hawaii (BYU–Hawaii), a position he has held since July 1, 2020. He was also sustained as an area seventy in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on April 4, 2024. Kauwe previously served as chair of the Department of Biology and as dean of Graduate Studies at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah. He is a researcher who specializes in the genetics of Alzheimer's disease.
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