Paul Martin Brakefield FRS (born 31 May 1952, Woking) [1] is a British evolutionary biologist and Professor of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, where he is also Fellow of Trinity College and until 2019 was director of the Museum of Zoology. He previously held the Chair in Evolutionary Biology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and was President of the Linnean Society of London from 2015 to 2018. He is best known for his research on butterfly eyespots.
In 1987 Brakefield became a Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Leiden University. In 2010 he left Leiden after serving as a professor for 23 years to become director of the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology. [2] In 2011, Brakefield was elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. [3] On 22 May 2015 Brakefield became President of the Linnean Society of London, serving until May 2018. [4] [5] [6]
Brakefield works mostly with butterflies and insects. Amongst other topics his research focuses on eyespots on butterflies, especially Bicyclus anynana . [2] [7] The butterfly species Bicyclus brakefieldi is named after him.
Brakefield was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2010. [8] He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011. [9] Brakefield was elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2014. [10]
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.
Butterflies are insects in the macrolepidopteran clade Rhopalocera from the order Lepidoptera, which also includes moths. Adult butterflies have large, often brightly coloured wings, and conspicuous, fluttering flight. The group comprises the large superfamily Papilionoidea, which contains at least one former group, the skippers, and the most recent analyses suggest it also contains the moth-butterflies. Butterfly fossils date to the Paleocene, about 56 million years ago.
The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) is a charity devoted to the worldwide conservation of animals and their habitats. It was founded in 1826. Since 1828, it has maintained the London Zoo, and since 1931 Whipsnade Park.
Stabilizing selection is a type of natural selection in which the population mean stabilizes on a particular non-extreme trait value. This is thought to be the most common mechanism of action for natural selection because most traits do not appear to change drastically over time. Stabilizing selection commonly uses negative selection to select against extreme values of the character. Stabilizing selection is the opposite of disruptive selection. Instead of favoring individuals with extreme phenotypes, it favors the intermediate variants. Stabilizing selection tends to remove the more severe phenotypes, resulting in the reproductive success of the norm or average phenotypes. This means that most common phenotype in the population is selected for and continues to dominate in future generations.
Sir Paul Patrick Gordon Bateson, was an English biologist with interests in ethology and phenotypic plasticity. Bateson was a professor at the University of Cambridge and served as president of the Zoological Society of London from 2004 to 2014.
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.
Nicholas Hamilton Barton is a British evolutionary biologist.
Sir Michael John Berridge was a British physiologist and biochemist.
Florence Gwendolen Rees, FRS was a Welsh zoologist and parasitologist. She was the first Welsh woman to become a fellow of the Royal Society. By the time she was 80 years old, she had published 68 papers.
An eyespot is an eye-like marking. They are found in butterflies, reptiles, cats, birds and fish.
Dame Georgina Mary Mace, was a British ecologist and conservation scientist. She was Professor of Biodiversity and Ecosystems at University College London, and previously Professor of Conservation Science and Director of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Centre for Population Biology, Imperial College London (2006–2012) and Director of Science at the Zoological Society of London (2000–2006).
Paul H. Harvey is a British evolutionary biologist. He is Professor of Zoology and was head of the zoology department at the University of Oxford from 1998 to 2011 and Secretary of the Zoological Society of London from 2000 to 2011, holding these posts in conjunction with a professorial fellowship at Jesus College, Oxford.
Irene Manton, FRS FLS was a British botanist who was Professor of Botany at the University of Leeds. She was noted for study of ferns and algae.
The Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom (MBA) is a learned society with a scientific laboratory that undertakes research in marine biology. The organisation was founded in 1884 and has been based in Plymouth since the Citadel Hill Laboratory was opened on 30 June 1888.
Robert McNeill (Neill) Alexander, CBE FRS was a British zoologist and a leading authority in the field of biomechanics. For thirty years he was Professor of Zoology at the University of Leeds.
Bicyclus anynana is a small brown butterfly in the family Nymphalidae, the most globally diverse family of butterflies. It is primarily found in eastern Africa from southern Sudan to Eswatini. It is found mostly in woodland areas and flies close to the ground. Male wingspans are 35–40 mm and female wingspans are 45–49 mm.
Colin Patterson FRS (1933–1998), was a British palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London from 1962 to his official retirement in 1993 who specialised in fossil fish and systematics, advocating the transformed cladistics school.
Ernest William MacBride FRS was a British/Irish marine biologist, one of the last supporters of Lamarckian evolution.
Timothy Robert Birkhead is a British ornithologist. He has been Professor of Behaviour and Evolution at the University of Sheffield since 1976.
Paul Martin Sharp is Professor of Genetics at the University of Edinburgh, where he holds the Alan Robertson chair of genetics in the Institute of Evolutionary Biology.