In the comments below in regards to the great evolutionary biologists, and the "Top 10 list," I received some good submissions. But, there is definitely (in my mind) a top tier which I am inflexible about.
Darwin - he basically invented the field as a science, made some darn good predictions (H. sapiens as an African species) and put forward ideas that are today being taken up again (sexual selection)
R.A. Fisher - Not only did he fuse Mendelian genetics with evolutionary biology ("biomemtrics"), and so lay the foundation for the Modern Synthesis, he is also the father of statistics
Sewall Wright - Though not as acute a theoretical thinker as Fisher, he brought a more grounded and empirical perspective to mathematical population genetics and shaped the perspectives of Dobzhansky & Mayr
J.B.S. Haldane - If R.A. Fisher was the strategist who had the "big picture" under control, Haldane was the quick-silver tactician, attacking problems in a sometimes ad hoc, but often ingenius manner
Theodosius Dobzhansky - He is the experimentalist in the bunch, and the mentor of Richard Lewontin, another "great," as well as a crucial mediator of Wright's theoretical work to other biologists
Some in the comments brought up individuals who I think need to be more well known. Russian thinkers like I. I. Schmalhausen are often forgotten because of the caprice of history (John brings him up). David points out the chronological skew in the list, the later thinkers had a lot more to work with, while to a great extent Darwin synthesized evolutionary biology from whole cloth (and presupposed some fallacious ideas, such as the blending theory of inheritance). Another individual suggested Crick & Watson. Obviously much of evolutionary genentics, and certainly genomics, are predicated on DNA, so I can see that point. But biology is predicated on physics, that doesn't imply that Isaac Newton is a great biologist!
In any case, I would like to speak to two individuals who I assumed would come up in the message boards: Richard Dawkins and S.J. Gould. I excluded them from the list consciously: I don't think they shine as evolutionary biologists. Dawkins is a fine philosopher of evolutionary biology. He has taken Fisherian (via Hamilton) individual level selectionism to its logical conclusion and explored its many ramifications. Gould was a very erudite historian of evolutionary biology. From what I can gather his adventures in used book stores looking for copies of untranslated German texts would make many a professional historian proud. They are both fine scholars, but that does not make them top flight scientists. Dawkins is trained as an ethologist, and he is endowed as a professor for the public understanding of science. To make a crass analogy, he is on the sales staff, not in R & D. Confusing him for W.D. Hamilton, let alone R.A. Fisher, is like assuming that the salesmen who delivers computers to your corporate headquarters could take over on designing a new chip from scratch. A salesmen can boot up the machine and show you all its neat tricks, its strengths and weaknesses, but he isn't a Creator of the marvel de novo. With Gould the situation is different. From what I can gather Dawkins is conscious about his role as a mediator of the ideas of men like Hamilton (inclusive fitness) and J. M. Smith (hawk vs. dove), but Gould attempted to make splash in the field on his own with his "punctuated equilibrium." He attempted to bring the insights of paleontology and higher taxon level evolutionary dynamics into the fray to supplement, and perhaps equal, genetics as the fundamental level of analysis. I don't think he suceeded. Paleontologists like Elizabeth Vrba make use of punctuated equilibrium, but paleontology is a small corner of evolutionary biology, and that's where Gould started out in the first place. Models of selection derived from Fisher, Wright and Haldane, assumptions of neutrality as a null hypothesis (thanks Motoo!), or innovative uses of molecular methods following in the foot-steps of Lewontin are ubiquitous in evolutionary biology. Some of Gould's cautions about adaptionist over-reach are probably spot-on, but, this trends toward philosophy, and I don't think he was as seminal in this process as perceived himself to be.
There is a consistent problem with the public confusing popularizers with real luminaries in fields, and this certainly has happened in evolutionary biology. In astronomy Carl Sagan is no Chandrasekhar, and in theoretical physics Stephen Hawking is no Ed Witten. Similarly, Dawkins is no Hamilton and Gould is no Wright.
In short, for those in the office who only boot up the the Word Process or do some data entry in Excel the wisdom of the salesmen might be all that needs to be acknowledged. But for those of us who wish to squeeze the most juice from the machine, we need to make sure and keep in mind the original designers.
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Old School: Pasteur, Koch, Ehrlich (antibodies, that is)?
DNA = hereditary molecule
Hershey (and Chase?)
Avery (and McLeod and McCarty?)
Molecular Biology
Paul Berg (that one's pretty recent, but also very big!)
Sanger (along w/ Maxam and Gilbert in parallel)
Your list is a bit too population genetics heavy, imho - of course, we all reflect where we come from (scientifically, I mean )...
Never mind! You could argue for some of those being important to Evol. Biology, but none of them are really Evol. Biologists. Please ignore (it's a good list, though!)
yes, many of those individuals wrote/did good things in regards to evolutionary biology. but it wasn't their bread & butter.
Hennig set up the logic of classification in biology that will, I consider, survive for centuries. It is not that he is a "superstar" (yes, I've seen the Farris pic in Hull's book) but that he clarified the logic and reason for classification. Hitherto almost everyone had been confused. I don't agree with all his ideas (particularly not the convention to "extinguish" a species name at speciation events), but he will end up more influential than almost all of your top ten. That said, he was precursed by a number of others.
No, they aren't. In fact they are quite different to Darwin's and he is really misunderstood by those who read him ths way. But I was suggesting him for his pioneering work on biogeographical distribution. In this he is The Man.
john, i'm aware that systematics really started with hennig. to make a long story short, i'm don't think that systematics is that important.
Why not separate the three epochs, as someone suggested and make three lists. Plus a fourth list of people who were not evolutionary biologists but had a huge impact on it.
Let's presume that nobody prior to the publication of the Origin counts (though some may disagree), who would you put in those four lists?
A quick - off the top of my head, not-final, lists:
The ancients:
1.Darwin, no need to explain
2.Wallace - as john said, for biogeography
3.T.H.Huxley - maybe, maybe not
4 and 5.Bates and Muller - the first people to move away from theory and apply evolution in their research
6.Haeckel - without him, the rest of Europe would have not received Darwin for decades later. While from our perspective he was wrong in many ways, he also got a lot of stuff right, coined a bunch of terms we still use today (e.g., ecology) and set the research program for all of Europe for the latter half of the 19th century.
7.Chetverikov - beginning of the Russian school
Middle:
Fisher, Haldane, Wright, Dobzhansky, Mayr, Simpson, Stebbins, Ford, Waddington, Rencsh, Goldschmidt, Tinbergen, Hamilton
Recent:
Lewontin, Maynard Smith, Gould, Nusslein-Wolhardt, Lynn Margulis, E.O.Wilson, D.S.Wilson, Bob Brandon, Elliott Sober, Rudolf Raff, Stu Kauffmann
Outside influences:
Mendel, Bateson, de Vries, Freud, d'Arcy Thompson, T.H.Morgan, Erwin Schrodinger, Watson & Crick
I disagree with the notion that Gould's science is not up to par - your own preferences bias you agains seeing the importance of paleontological work (hence Simpson is missing from the top 10). Gould's research is excellent and it led him to get new ideas. The ideas he put together in Structure are the path for the 21st century biology.
The ideas he put together in Structure are the path for the 21st century biology.
time will tell :) who would you swap out for simpson though??? i considered him but didn't want to drop anyone else out.
I have to agree with John on both counts here.
Hennig is certainly more commonly associated with systematics than with evolutionary biology per se, but his work provided the basis for most of the determination of evolutionary relationships that's done today - including all of the methods based on molecular markers. It also marked a dramatic departure from the older, more authoritarian, school (exemplified by Mayr), where evolutionary groups were proposed based primarily on the intuition of the systematists working with the group.
Wallace is best known for his association with natural selection, but I think his more original and important contribution to evolutionary biology actually came earlier, in 1855, when he proposed what's now known as "Wallace's Law." ("Every species has come into existence coincident in space and time with a closely allied species.")
Oh, and systematics is important, but that's a different argument.
oh, i'm aware that hennig made systematics a science...but ok, to get a sense, would you place him above 'the 10' i listed, as john implies by his assertion of hennig's importance?
(systematics is important, but i think functional relationships, and yes, phenetics, are not small potatos either)
Gould attempted to make splash in the field on his own with his "punctuated equilibrium."
Punctuated equilibrium was Gould's in name only. Eldredge came up with the idea, and Gould gave it the name. Gould deserves to be on a list of great popularizers of science (with sagan, hawking, dawkins, etc), but he's known for his essays not his research.
from what i have seen eldridge's work seems more modest in intent, and yes, as RPM says the basic outline of gould's thinking is there (i still don't buy taxa level selection or shit, thatz just weird bitches).
Its' hard to choose. Of the original 10 from your list, Maynard Smith is the weakest link, but is Simpson stronger? Perhaps he is, but one's bias may show. Several years ago I would have definitely picked Simpson over Maynard Smith, but now, after all the work on transitions, it's a much harder choice.
I think that the one thing that this excercise is demonstrating more clearly than anything else is that it's really not possible to come up with a top ten list that everyone's going to agree with. Evolutionary biology is too broad a field, and too much work has been put into it by too many people, across too broad a range of subdisciplines.
I can't think of anyone I'd like to throw off of your list to make room for Simpson, Ohta, Hennig, or some of the other suggestions, but I don't think that any list of the great evolutionary biologists is complete without them, either.
Bite your tongue! It's what I study, so of course it is important!
Seriously, systematics is a core activity of science, in and outside of biology. It has been downgraded by a century of physics-envy, but even chemistry freed itself from that tyranny. Don't believe in Popper...
Just do a historiometric analysis of citations, column space in science encyclopedias, etc. There's no such thing as an unrecognized genius, so they'll show up at the top of such lists. There is a tendency to overemphasize the importance of the recent past ("epochcentrism"), but if we're talking mostly 20th C figures anyway, all are pretty recent.
I've got $100 that says Maynard Smith comes out above Simpson. Any takers?
Agnostic, I fully intend on being an unrecognized genius, thank you very much. In fact I mentioned one in my most recent post on my blog. Warren G. Kinzey. He's not near the caliber of a top ten guy, but he's not as widely read in behavioral and evolutionary ecology as he should be.
As far as GG Simpson and who he should replace, I still say Kimura. But regardless a large portion of the top ten list include people whose work is so dependent on others in the top ten that you could easily drop one of hte geneticists with huge overlaps with another for GG Simpson.
And Maynard Smith I'd argue is one of the strongest of the top ten due to his work with game theory and animal signalling.
Your comment goes exactly to the central point that the new documentary "Flock of Dodos" tries to make: the problem with evolution is that evolutionists don't see the importance of effectively communicating with the public. Hence the general denigration of those who assume the role of popularizer.
Gould and Dawkins were/are both good in that role.
Plus your labelling Gould "not a biologist" is silly academic categorical hair-splitting. Gould was most definitely an evolutionist. OK so he never ran a gel or bred a fruit fly, but so what? He and his peers worked tirelessly to plug gaps in the fossil record, *and then communicate those findings to the public*, which is at least as important to evolution as is modern experimental work. Evolution is after all *also* a theory about history.
Perhaps you should think more carefully before you pose questions like this one. If you already knew the right and wrong answers, why even bother asking?
OK, I should dial back my annoyance somewhat. If you find it a fun exercise to try to list the "top ten" then have at it. Include or don't include people who you consider biologists. Whatever.
Still, it is nice to know that there are SO MANY individuals to choose from, people who've done great work. This is something the other side can't really say for their own supporters. While our team has adapted and changed and progressed, moving the ball down the field scoring touchdown after touchdown, their team is still running the one play that was designed by Paley 200 years ago.
Plus your labelling Gould "not a biologist" is silly academic categorical hair-splitting. Gould was most definitely an evolutionist.
putting words in my mouth will make you unwelcome quickly. i chose my words carefully. i did not imply that gould was not an evolutionary biologists (or dawkins), i meant they were/are not great evolutionary biologists (great as in generating discipline altering scholarship). when you take my meaning in that straightforward fashion your annoyance seems misplaced.
darwin obviously never ran a gel either. you impute to me explicit categories which i clearly don't hold (hamilton wasn't much of a gel guy either).