John Maynard Smith was a British theoretical and mathematical evolutionary biologist and geneticist. Originally an aeronautical engineer during the Second World War, he took a second degree in genetics under the well-known biologist J. B. S. Haldane. Maynard Smith was instrumental in the application of game theory to evolution with George R. Price, and theorised on other problems such as the evolution of sex and signalling theory.
Genetic drift, also known as random genetic drift, allelic drift or the Wright effect, is the change in the frequency of an existing gene variant (allele) in a population due to random chance.
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.
Molecular evolution is the process of change in the sequence composition of cellular molecules such as DNA, RNA, and proteins across generations. The field of molecular evolution uses principles of evolutionary biology and population genetics to explain patterns in these changes. Major topics in molecular evolution concern the rates and impacts of single nucleotide changes, neutral evolution vs. natural selection, origins of new genes, the genetic nature of complex traits, the genetic basis of speciation, the evolution of development, and ways that evolutionary forces influence genomic and phenotypic changes.
Population genetics is a subfield of genetics that deals with genetic differences within and among populations, and is a part of evolutionary biology. Studies in this branch of biology examine such phenomena as adaptation, speciation, and population structure.
Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life forms on Earth. Evolution holds that all species are related and gradually change over generations. In a population, the genetic variations affect the phenotypes of an organism. These changes in the phenotypes will be an advantage to some organisms, which will then be passed onto their offspring. Some examples of evolution in species over many generations are the peppered moth and flightless birds. 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.
Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection is an idea about genetic variance in population genetics developed by the statistician and evolutionary biologist Ronald Fisher. The proper way of applying the abstract mathematics of the theorem to actual biology has been a matter of some debate.
Motoo Kimura was a Japanese biologist best known for introducing the neutral theory of molecular evolution in 1968. He became one of the most influential theoretical population geneticists. He is remembered in genetics for his innovative use of diffusion equations to calculate the probability of fixation of beneficial, deleterious, or neutral alleles. Combining theoretical population genetics with molecular evolution data, he also developed the neutral theory of molecular evolution in which genetic drift is the main force changing allele frequencies. James F. Crow, himself a renowned population geneticist, considered Kimura to be one of the two greatest evolutionary geneticists, along with Gustave Malécot, after the great trio of the modern synthesis, Ronald Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, and Sewall Wright.
In population genetics, linkage disequilibrium (LD) is the non-random association of alleles at different loci in a given population. Loci are said to be in linkage disequilibrium when the frequency of association of their different alleles is higher or lower than expected if the loci were independent and associated randomly.
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.
Tomoko Ohta is a Japanese scientist and Professor Emeritus of the National Institute of Genetics. Ohta works on population genetics/molecular evolution and is known for developing the nearly neutral theory of evolution.
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.
Genetic hitchhiking, also called genetic draft or the hitchhiking effect, is when an allele changes frequency not because it itself is under natural selection, but because it is near another gene that is undergoing a selective sweep and that is on the same DNA chain. When one gene goes through a selective sweep, any other nearby polymorphisms that are in linkage disequilibrium will tend to change their allele frequencies too. Selective sweeps happen when newly appeared mutations are advantageous and increase in frequency. Neutral or even slightly deleterious alleles that happen to be close by on the chromosome 'hitchhike' along with the sweep. In contrast, effects on a neutral locus due to linkage disequilibrium with newly appeared deleterious mutations are called background selection. Both genetic hitchhiking and background selection are stochastic (random) evolutionary forces, like genetic drift.
Joseph "Joe" Felsenstein is a Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Genome Sciences and Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is best known for his work on phylogenetic inference, and is the author of Inferring Phylogenies, and principal author and distributor of the package of phylogenetic inference programs called PHYLIP. Closely related to his work on phylogenetic inference is his introduction of methods for making statistically independent comparisons using phylogenies.
Masatoshi Nei was a Japanese-born American evolutionary biologist.
Wen-Hsiung Li is a Taiwanese-American scientist working in the fields of molecular evolution, population genetics, and genomics. He is currently the James Watson Professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago and a Principal Investigator at the Institute of Information Science and Genomics Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taiwan.
Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary information encoded in genes, which can be transmitted to future generations. Another major theme is evolution, which explains the unity and diversity of life. Energy processing is also important to life as it allows organisms to move, grow, and reproduce. Finally, all organisms are able to regulate their own internal environments.
Takashi Gojobori is a Japanese molecular biologist, Vice-Director of the National Institute of Genetics (NIG) and the DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) at NIG, in Mishima, Japan. Gojobori is a Distinguished Professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. He is a Professor of Bioscience and Acting Director at the Computational Bioscience Research Center at KAUST.
Daniel L. Hartl is the Higgins Professor of Biology in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He is also a principal investigator at the Hartl Laboratory at Harvard University. His research interests are focused on evolutionary genomics, molecular evolution, and population genetics.
Mark A. Kirkpatrick is a theoretical population geneticist and evolutionary biologist. He currently holds the T. S. Painter Centennial Professorship in Genetics in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin. His research touches on a wide variety of topics, including the evolution of sex chromosomes, sexual selection, and speciation. Kirkpatrick is the co-author, along with Douglas J. Futuyma, of a popular undergraduate evolution textbook. He is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences.
