The Linnean Society of London awards the prestigious Darwin-Wallace Medal 2008

The President of the Society, Professor David F Cutler, will award medals on Thursday 12th February 2009, the 200th birthday of Charles Robert Darwin, to: Professor Nick Barton FRS,  Professor M W Chase FRS, FLS, Professor B C Clarke FRS, FLS, Professor Joseph Felsenstein, the late Professor Stephen Jay Gould, Professor P R Grant FRS, FLS, Dr Rosemary Grant FRS, Professor J L B Mallet FLS, Professor Lynn Margulis FLS, the late Professor John Maynard Smith FRS, FLS, Professor Mohamed Noor, Professor H Allen Orr and Professor Linda Partridge FRS. The medals will be presented on Darwin’s 200th birthday, 12th February 2009. 

In recognition of the continuing importance of research on evolutionary biology, the Society is pleased to announce that it will now award the medal annually from May 2009.

The Darwin-Wallace Medal was first awarded in 1908 (1 gold and 6 silver) and again in 1958 (20 in silver). The re-struck Medal has a profile of Darwin on the obverse and a full-face image of Wallace on the reverse, with the marginal inscription “LINN. SOC. LOND. 1 July 1858” on both sides. 

Notes for Editors

The Linnean Society of London is the world’s oldest active biological society. Founded in 1788, the Society takes its name from the great Swedish naturalist, Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) who developed the system of binomial nomenclature. This system today provides the fundamental framework for knowledge of the biota of the Earth, supporting effective conservation measures and the sustainable use of biodiversity.  The Society is the custodian of Linnaeus’ original library and collections and is creating a digital archive, enabling full global access. It encourages and communicates scientific advances through its three world-class journals, open meetings and website. The Society’s Fellowship is international and its Fellows are drawn from all walks of life including professional scientists and amateur naturalists. The Society welcomes anyone interested in natural history, in all its forms. www.linnean.org

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The Award Winners

Professor Nick Barton FRS, University of Edinburgh

Professor Barton is one of the major theoretical population geneticists alive today.  From his early work on hybrid zones, he has made major advances with strong practical implications for the understanding of speciation, dispersal, multilocus evolution, the evolution of sex, hybridization, and geographic range evolution. For instance, Barton showed for the first time how measurements in hybrid zones, such as of hybrid zone width and linkage disequilibria, can be used to estimate rates of selection and gene flow under natural conditions. Professor Barton’s theory work has been complemented by ground-breaking empirical research on toads, butterflies and grasshoppers, especially in the evolution of traits which depend upon interactions between large numbers of genes. Such interactions determine the way populations adapt in response to natural and artificial selection, and also the way they diverge to form separate species.

Professor Mark Chase FRS, FLS

Over the past 15 years Professor Chase has inspired and led the team that has produced two versions of the new classification of Angiosperms that has revolutionized thinking about the evolutionary history and relationships of Flowering Plants.  This has had profound implications for the classification and systematic study of the group, inter alia identifying the paraphyly of the Dicotyledons and providing a robust phylogeny and new classification for the Monocotyledons.  He has also taken a lead in the study of the Orchidaceae, one of the largest families of Flowering Plants and one of the most diverse.  He has been one of the four editors and compilers of the monumental Genera Orchidacearum project which involves the collaboration of almost 100 scientists worldwide, a model for large scale collaborations on difficult groups of organisms, as indeed is the Angiosperm Phylogeny project.

Professor Bryan Clarke FRS, FLS

Professor Clarke has had a long and distinguished career as a population geneticist and evolutionary biologist. He is best known for his work on frequency-dependent selection, in contexts as diverse as host-parasite interactions and the demography of snails. His research on snails in Moorea, Tahiti and other islands, combined with behaviour and genetics research in the lab, is a classical study of speciation and adaptive diversification. It led to the founding of breeding stocks in the laboratory at a time when the natural populations were declining to extinction. He is a leader in conservation genetics of endangered species.

Professor Joseph Felsenstein

Professor Joseph Felsenstein has made seminal contributions to molecular phylogenetics, population genetics and evolutionary biology.  His contributions include development of likelihood algorithms for phylogeny reconstruction and introduction of the bootstrap to assess phylogenetic accuracy.  These have played a pivotal role in transforming the field from one of  philosophical arguments to one of rigorous model-based statistical inference. Felsenstein has also made fundamental contributions to theoretical population genetics, on the effects of recombination and sex and on estimation of population genetics parameters from a DNA sample under the coalescent model.  His work on comparative methods is widely used to infer correlation of character evolution.  Felsenstein's computer programs have enabled these methods to be widely applied to real data analysis.

Professor Stephen Jay Gould FRS, NA (deceased 2002; formerly Harvard University)

Professor Gould was perhaps the most influential, and certainly the most rounded, evolutionary biologist of the late 20th century. His empirical studies focused on fossil molluscs, but his greater contributions lay in the realm of innovation and promotion of concepts that now underpin both neontological and palaeontological studies, including heterochrony, heterotopy, exaptation, and the punctuated equilibrium model of evolutionary diversification. He authored many scientifically rigorous and scholarly books. Ontogeny and phylogeny (1977) revitalised evolutionary-developmental studies worldwide, while The mismeasure of man (1981) linked Gould’s scientific expertise to his social conscience. The structure of evolutionary theory (2002), a magnum opus written during his final illness, epitomised his breadth of interests and depth of understanding. Furthermore, he was the finest evolutionary essayist of the age, penning a series of highly readable books (beginning with Ever since Darwin, 1977) that probably inspired more young people to become evolutionary (palaeo)biologists than any other single cause.

Professor P. R. Grant FLS FRS and Professor Rosemary Grant FRS

Professor Grant describes himself as being ”interested in ecology, evolution and behaviour” seeking an  “understanding of the origin of new species, their ecological interactions, their persistence in different communities and their ultimate extinction.” His has undertaken intensive investigation of Darwin's Finches on the Galápagos Islands over a period of over 30 years. This work has been pursued in close partnership with his wife Prof. Rosemary Grant.  She, in turn, describes her work as being the study of the “diversity of individuals produced by the interaction between genetics, ecology and behaviour. How natural selection acts on this variation; the evolutionary response to natural selection and the bearing this has on the process of speciation.” Together they are interested in a wide variety of questions in evolution, ecology and behaviour and have supervised graduate students working on the evolution of horns in beetles, polyandry in flightless cormorants, nest parasitism in coots, social organization of parrots, and the inheritance of spot patterns in butterflies. Both are evolutionary biologists contributing significantly to our understanding of the underlying processes involved.

Professor James (Jim) Mallet FLS

Professor Mallet runs one of the most influential evolutionary laboratories in the country. A genuinely broad natural historian, he integrates a wide range of field and laboratory data in his studies of speciation in insects, particularly Lepidoptera. He has played a key role in testing shifting balance theory, an important and increasingly influential supplement to classical neodarwinian paradigm. His breadth of interests have prompted a wide range of collaborations, enhancing in particular his co-evolutionary studies. He has also been an unstinting advocate of systematic biology as an essential framework for all meaningful evolutionary studies, actively contributing to organisations such as the Royal Entomological Society and the Linnean Society and is co-director of the London-based Centre for Evolution and Ecology.

Professor Lynn Margulis FLS

Professor Margulis is a distinguished biologist and Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  Globally renowned for her theory of the origin of eukaryotic cells from bacterial antecedents – known as SET theory, or “Serial Endosymbiosis Theory”, she first advanced this in a paper, The Origin of Mitosing Eukaryotic Cells, published in 1966.  The importance of this theory, now widely accepted, is illustrated by the fact that Ernst Mayr, the renowned evolutionary biologist, considered this step as the single most important evolutionary event in all of biology.  SET theory was also the subject of her book, Origin of Eukaryotic Cells, published in 1970. Despite sustained opposition from scientific colleagues, she has pioneered the recognition of symbiosis as an important evolutionary force, particularly so in the origins of major evolutionary taxa.  She played a major role in founding the International Symbiosis Society and has worked systematically within her own field, studying protists, making many important biological observations and teaching a generation of undergraduates and graduates the basic science and methodology of symbiogenesis. While it is true that she has been somewhat controversial in opposing the exclusivity of mutation-plus-selection as the explanation of evolution, she is a keen admirer of Charles Darwin

Professor John Maynard Smith FRS, FLS (deceased 2004, formerly University of Sussex )

Professor Maynard Smith FRS was by far the most influential British evolutionary biologist of the second half of the 20th century. Architect of the world-leading Sussex University school of ‘mathematical selection’, he elevated to a higher plane the mathematical population genetics approaches developed in the UK by RA Fisher, and then compounded this remarkable achievement by applying the previously economically focused game theory to evolutionary problems. These breakthroughs prompted many high-impact papers (leading to a relatively early FRS) and several technically rigorous but readable books. Unusually among population-level thinkers, Maynard Smith was also deeply interested in profound evolutionary transitions, culminating in The major transitions in evolution (1995). The real intellect behind more determined publicists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, Maynard Smith remained a genuine innovator throughout his long career. His exceptional abilities and egalitarian worldview earned him great affection from evolutionary biologists worldwide.

Professor Mohamed Noor

Professor Noor specialises in Drosophila evolution and is currently a Professor at Duke University. He stands out as the first scientist to demonstrate "reinforcement" experimentally; i.e. that mating preferences diverge as a result of natural selection against deleterious hybridization. He has recently developed a new model of speciation that predicts how chromosomal rearrangements can trap divergently selected variation. On the basis of his work with Drosophila, this model is now accepted as a likely important first phase of speciation. In 2007 he contributed to sequencing the genomes of twelve Drosophila species, work that was published in Nature and that has become the benchmark for the emerging field of comparative genomics. He holds or has held many honours and editorial posts, such as editor for the international journal Evolution and has authored over 100 publications.

Professor H. Allen Orr

Professor Orr's innovative combination of studies on the biology of Drosophila and theoretical work led to the rehabilitation of Muller's "dominance theory" explanation for Haldane's Rule. He showed definitively that deleterious hybrid effects were largely recessive, explaining why the hemizygous (XY) sex suffers most. He then modelled evolution towards adaptive optima, and showed how a few single gene effects could often be large, a result which other population geneticists thought they had ruled out, but which is central to our current understanding of how evolution works in nature. His recent work shows how speciation may be influenced by "Dobzhansky-Müller incompatibilities". With Professor Jerry Coyne, he published the definitive book Speciation (2004), and he contributes many important popular articles and lectures defending evolution against creationism and intelligent design.

Professor Linda Partridge FRS

Professor Partridge has used the model organism Drosophila melanogaster to investigate the evolution of a wide variety of physiological traits involved in adaptation. Her research is directed to understanding fitness-related traits, particularly ageing and body size, and has brought new insights into how these traits influence organisms throughout their lifespans. She is the recipient of many awards, and has been awarded the CBE for services to evolutionary biology. She is the director of the UCL Centre for Research on Ageing, and has recently become the director a new Max Planck institute on the same topic. Her current research focuses on physiological mechanisms that force organisms to make trade-offs, such as that between high nutrient intake and high reproductive rate, on one hand, and slow ageing on the other.

Pictures

The 1908 Darwin-Wallace medal obverse (top) and reverse (bottom).