The Linnean Society of London awards the prestigious Darwin-Wallace Medal 2008 to 13 outstanding scientists for work in “major advances in evolutionary biology since 1958”

Awards: 12th February at the Linnean Society of London, 4.30pm

Media Advisory Source: The Linnean Society of London

Published: 10th February 2009

The Linnean Society of London will recognise the significant achievements of 13 outstanding scientists who have made major advances in evolutionary biology during the last 50 years at the presentation of the 2008 Darwin-Wallace Medals on February 12th 2009, the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Robert Darwin.  The award commemorates the 150th reading of the joint Darwin-Wallace paper “On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection” at the Linnean Society of London in 1858.

This joint paper provided a significant catalyst for research and the development of a new biological discipline – evolutionary biology.  The rapid expansion of this field, particularly over the last 50 years and the application of knowledge relating to evolutionary processes in animals and plants has had profound implications for many areas of biology, including the conservation of endangered species and research into the aging process.  Evolutionary techniques are also being applied in other disciplines, including nano-computing and industrial engineering.

The President of the Linnean Society, Professor David Cutler, who will present the awards comments “This is a very special occasion in the calendar of the Linnean Society of London.  Those awarded medals join a group of illustrious names spanning 150 years of research endeavour in this expanding and significant field”.

Medals will be awarded to Professor Nicholas Barton FRS, Professor Mark Chase FRS, FLS, Professor Bryan Clarke FRS, FLS, Professor Joseph Felsenstein, the late Professor Stephen Jay Gould, Professor Peter Grant FRS, FLS, Dr Rosemary Grant FRS, Professor James (Jim) 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. 

In recognition of the continued importance of this research and its interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary applications, the Society is delighted to announce that it will award the Darwin-Wallace medal on an annual basis from May 2010.

For more information and images or to arrange interviews, please contact Kate Longhurst, Communications Manager on Tel: +44 (0)20 7434 4479 or Email: kate(at)linnean.org.

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

The Darwin-Wallace medals are named after two of the Society’s most famous Fellows, Charles Robert Darwin, elected to Fellowship on 7th March 1854 and Alfred Russel Wallace, elected to Fellowship on 18th January 1871.  Their joint paper, “On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection” was read for the first time at The Linnean Society of London, on 1st July 1858.  The first Darwin-Wallace medals were struck and presented in 1908 to mark the 50th Anniversary of this occasion and have been presented at 50-year intervals since.  Silver medals were presented to 6 recipients in 1908 and to a further 20 recipients in 1958.  To date, only one gold medal has been struck and presented, an honour reserved for Alfred Russel Wallace himself in 1908.

The Award Winners

Professor Nicholas Barton FRS

Professor Barton’s early research was on the narrow zones of hybridization that subdivide many populations; this involved work on a variety of species, including grasshoppers, butterflies, and toads. More recently, his research has been mainly theoretical and aimed at understanding the influence of selection on complex traits, models of speciation, the evolution of sex and recombination, and the coalescent process. He has co-authored a textbook, Evolution, which aims to combine molecular and organismal aspects of the subject.  He has worked at Department of Genetics, University College London (1982-1990), and at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology, University of Edinburgh (1990-2008), and has recently moved to the Institute of Science and Technology in Austria.

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)

Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) was among the best known and widely read scientists of the late 20th century.  A paleontologist and educator at Harvard University, Gould made his largest contributions to science as the leading spokes-person for evolutionary theory.  His monthly columns in Natural History magazine and his popular works on evolution have earned him numerous awards and one of the largest readerships in the popular-science genre — penning altogether over twenty five successful books throughout his career.  For more than 30 years Gould served on the faculty at Harvard, where he was Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, Professor of Geology, Biology, and the History of Science, as well as curator for Invertebrate Paleontology at the institution's Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Professor Peter Grant FLS FRS and Professor Rosemary Grant FRS

Peter and Rosemary Grant have been studying Darwin’s finches on the Galápagos islands since 1973. Their fieldwork is designed to understand the causes of an adaptive radiation.  It combines analyses of archipelago-wide patterns of evolution with detailed investigations of population level processes on two islands, Genovesa and Daphne.  Their work is a blend of ecology, behavior and genetics.  They have collaborated with investigators to estimate phylogenetic relations among the species of finches and their relatives on the continent and in the Caribbean, and to identify the molecular mechanisms involved in the development of beaks that vary so conspicuously among the species.  Their earlier work has been published in two books.  A third book, entitled How and Why Species Multiply, was published by Princeton University Press in 2008.

Rosemary was initially trained at the University of Edinburgh, received a PhD degree from Uppsala University, and was a Research scholar and lecturer with the rank of Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University until she retired from teaching in 2008. Peter is the Class of 1877 Professor Emeritus in the same Department, having trained at Cambridge University and the University of British Columbia.  Before joining Princeton in 1986 he taught at McGill University and the University of Michigan.

Professor James (Jim) Mallet FLS

Professor Mallet runs one of the most influential evolutionary genetics laboratories in the country.  A genuinely broad natural historian, he integrates a wide range of field and genetic data in his studies of speciation in insects, particularly Lepidoptera.  His  ideas on mimicry, the nature of species, ecological speciation, hybridisation, and the shifting balance theory based on Lepidoptera have always been controversial, but have sparked a great deal of active debate which is still ongoing.  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 University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.  An “evolutionist”, not an evolutionary biologist, she has detailed the multiple symbiotic origins of nucleated cells from bacterial antecedents (SET or Serial Endosymbiosis Theory). Presented as Origin of Mitosing Cells, (1966) she developed the idea of Symbiosis in Cell Evolution: Microbial communities in the Archean and Proterozoic eons, 3rd ed., in her book-length monograph.  She continues to pioneer the recognition of symbiogenesis in the origin of eukaryotic species and more inclusive taxa. With her students and colleagues in the field and laboratory she investigates microbial symbioses, especially bacteria and protoctists under microoxic conditions.  A co-founder of two international societies Evolutionary Protistology (ISEP) and Symbiosis (ISS) and a member of the US National Academy of Science, she received a National Medal of Science from President Clinton in 1999.

Professor John Maynard Smith FRS, FLS (deceased 2004)

Professor Maynard Smith 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).  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 and Associate Chair at Duke University. He stands out as one of the first scientists to demonstrate “speciation via reinforcement” experimentally; i.e. that mating preferences diverge as a result of natural selection against deleterious hybridization.  He has more 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 phase of speciation.  In 2007, he contributed to the publication on the 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 close to 100 refereed publications.

Professor H. Allen Orr

Professor Orr is University Professor and Shirley Cox Kearns Chair of Biology at the University of Rochester.  He is an evolutionary biologist whose research focuses on speciation and adaptation.  His speciation work has primarily involved studies of hybrid sterility and inviability.  These studies have included genetic analyses of Haldane's rule, comparative studies of patterns that characterize speciation, and the molecular identification of genes that cause reproductive isolation.  He is the co-author of Speciation (with J. A. Coyne).  His adaptation work has involved mathematical studies of patterns that may characterize adaptive evolution.   Professor Orr also frequently contributes book reviews and essays to publications including The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker.   He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship, and the Dobzhansky Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution.

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 Institute of Healthy Ageing, and has recently become the director of 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.