Michael J. Wade is a professor of biology [1] at Indiana University Bloomington. Since 2009 he has been the Associate Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs at Indiana University. He is also affiliated faculty in the following departments and centers at Indiana University: Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior [2] (CISAB), the Cognitive Science Program , and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. [3]
Wade was a professor at University of Chicago from 1975 to 1998 (Assistant Professor, Department of Biology, 1975-1981; Associate Professor, Department of Biology, 1981-1986; Professor, Department of Ecology and Evolution , 1986-1998; Chair, Department of Ecology and Evolution, 1991-1998). He received his PhD from University of Chicago in 1975, under the joint tutelage of the ecologist Thomas Park and the theoretical population geneticist, Montgomery Slatkin (now at University of California, Berkeley). His doctoral committee included the cicada ecologist, Monty Lloyd, the laboratory ecologist, David Byron Mertz, and the anuran systematist, Robert Inger. Park arranged for him to meet and discuss his doctoral research with Sewall Wright on several occasions. His dissertation, and subsequent research program, focused on the evolution, ecology, and genetics of flour beetles of the genus Tribolium. At the earliest stages of his graduate career, he had been interested in the ecology of frogs in vernal ponds in Chicago.
Two central interests of Wade's research program are population structure and epistasis. Interactions at the population and genetic levels are often non-additive. Thus, explaining and predicting many genetic and evolutionary phenomena in nature require understanding non-additive causal effects. As Richard Lewontin wrote, "context and interaction are of the essence". [4] In effect, Wade has found extensive empirical support, in the laboratory and in the field, for Sewall Wright's Shifting balance theory. Through significant mathematical modeling, Wade has also shown that Wright's theory is robust and explanatorily powerful. Wade's results, in concert with work by David Sloan Wilson, helped rekindle interest in group selection in the biological community.
Wade has also done influential work on sexual selection (see papers with Stevan Arnold, and book with Stephen Shuster, cited below), and the genetics of speciation, stressing the need to consider variation within species as well as fixed differences among species. Recently, his work has turned to social evolution and indirect genetic effects (e.g., maternal effects). Wade and his collaborators are increasingly employing rich genomics data and turning to other model systems, such as social insects. [5]
In addition to biological topics, Wade is also interested in the history and philosophy of science, politics, and literature. He has published on topics central to the philosophy of science, such as levels and units of selection and causality.
Wade has published over 150 scientific papers and book chapters, [6] and received several distinctions, including membership in the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2007, in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008, and he was recognized with the Sewall Wright Award in 2009.
Genetic drift is the change in the frequency of an existing gene variant (allele) in a population due to random chance.
Population genetics is a subfield of genetics that deals with genetic differences within and between populations, and is a part of evolutionary biology. Studies in this branch of biology examine such phenomena as adaptation, speciation, and population structure.
Richard Charles Lewontin was an American evolutionary biologist, mathematician, geneticist, and social commentator. A leader in developing the mathematical basis of population genetics and evolutionary theory, he pioneered the application of techniques from molecular biology, such as gel electrophoresis, to questions of genetic variation and evolution.
Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes that produced the diversity of life on Earth. Simply, it is also defined as the study of the history of life forms on Earth. Evolution is based on the theory that all species are related and they gradually change over time. In a population, the genetic variations affect the physical characteristics i.e. phenotypes of an organism. These changes in the phenotypes will be an advantage to some organisms, which will then be passed onto their offspring. Peppered Moth and Flightless birds are some examples of evolution in species over many generations. In the 1930s, the discipline of evolutionary biology emerged through what Julian Huxley called the modern synthesis of understanding, from previously unrelated fields of biological research, such as genetics and ecology, systematics, and paleontology. A person who studies Evolutionary biology is called an Evolutionary biologist. The importance of studying Evolutionary biology is mainly to understand the principles behind the origin and extinction of species.
In biology, polymorphism is the occurrence of two or more clearly different morphs or forms, also referred to as alternative phenotypes, in the population of a species. To be classified as such, morphs must occupy the same habitat at the same time and belong to a panmictic population.
This is a list of topics in evolutionary biology.
William Ball Provine was an American historian of science and of evolutionary biology and population genetics. He was the Andrew H. and James S. Tisch Distinguished University Professor at Cornell University and was a professor in the Departments of History, Science and Technology Studies, and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
Adaptationism is the Darwinian view that many physical and psychological traits of organisms are evolved adaptations. Pan-adaptationism is the strong form of this, deriving from the early 20th century modern synthesis, that all traits are adaptations, a view now shared by only a few biologists.
Sewall Green Wright FRS(For) Honorary FRSE was an American geneticist known for his influential work on evolutionary theory and also for his work on path analysis. He was a founder of population genetics alongside Ronald Fisher and J. B. S. Haldane, which was a major step in the development of the modern synthesis combining genetics with evolution. He discovered the inbreeding coefficient and methods of computing it in pedigree animals. He extended this work to populations, computing the amount of inbreeding between members of populations as a result of random genetic drift, and along with Fisher he pioneered methods for computing the distribution of gene frequencies among populations as a result of the interaction of natural selection, mutation, migration and genetic drift. Wright also made major contributions to mammalian and biochemical genetics.
Douglas Joel Futuyma is an American evolutionary biologist. He is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York and a Research Associate on staff at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. His research focuses on speciation and population biology. Futuyma is the author of a widely used undergraduate textbook on evolution and is also known for his work in public outreach, particularly in advocating against creationism.
Brian Charlesworth is a British evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh, and editor of Biology Letters. Since 1997, he has been Royal Society Research Professor at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IEB) in Edinburgh. He has been married since 1967 to the British evolutionary biologist Deborah Charlesworth.
Richard "Dick" Levins was an ex-tropical farmer turned ecologist, a population geneticist, biomathematician, mathematical ecologist, and philosopher of science who researched diversity in human populations. Until his death, Levins was a university professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a long-time political activist. He was best known for his work on evolution and complexity in changing environments and on metapopulations.
Elisabeth Anne Lloyd is an American philosopher of biology. She currently holds the Arnold and Maxine Tanis Chair of History and Philosophy of Science and is also professor of biology, adjunct professor of philosophy at Indiana University, affiliated faculty scholar at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction and Adjunct Faculty at the Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior.
Mary Jane West-Eberhard is an American theoretical biologist noted for arguing that phenotypic and developmental plasticity played a key role in shaping animal evolution and speciation. She is also an entomologist notable for her work on the behavior and evolution of social wasps.
Russell Scott Lande is an American evolutionary biologist and ecologist, and an International Chair Professor at Centre for Biodiversity Dynamics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). He is a fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences.
John Charles Avise is an American evolutionary geneticist, conservationist, ecologist and natural historian. He is a Distinguished Professor of Ecology & Evolution, University of California, Irvine, and was previously a Distinguished Professor of Genetics at the University of Georgia.
Günter P. Wagner is an Austrian-born evolutionary biologist who is Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary biology at Yale University, and head of the Wagner Lab.
Epistasis is a phenomenon in genetics in which the effect of a gene mutation is dependent on the presence or absence of mutations in one or more other genes, respectively termed modifier genes. In other words, the effect of the mutation is dependent on the genetic background in which it appears. Epistatic mutations therefore have different effects on their own than when they occur together. Originally, the term epistasis specifically meant that the effect of a gene variant is masked by that of a different gene.
Ruth Geyer Shaw is a professor and principal investigator in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior at the University of Minnesota. She studies the processes involved in genetic variation, specializing in plant population biology and evolutionary quantitative genetics. Her work is particularly relevant in studying the effects of stressors such as climate instability and population fragmentation on evolutionary change in populations. She has developed and applied new statistical methods for her field and is considered a leading population geneticist.
Stevan James Arnold is an American evolutionary biologist. He is Professor Emeritus of Integrative Biology and Curator of Amphibians and Reptiles at Oregon State University, Corvallis. He has served as president of the Society for the Study of Evolution and the American Society of Naturalists.