Bryan Clarke

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Bryan Campbell Clarke (born June 24, 1932 - February 27, 2014 ) was a British evolutionary biologist and geneticist.

Youth and education

Clarke was the son of a leather merchant in Nottinghamshire who was killed in a bombing raid in London in 1941. He was sent to the Bahamas during World War II where his interest in clams and snails was piqued. After the death of his father, he was taken in by a family friend in Boston and returned to England in 1945. He later did his military service in the Royal Air Force and received a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied zoology and received his bachelor's degree in 1956 and his doctorate in 1961. From 1959 he was Assistant Lecturer and later Reader at the University of Edinburgh and in 1971 he became Professor of Genetics at the University of Nottingham , where he retired in 1997. 1971 to 1976 and 1981 to 1993 he headed the Faculty of Genetics.

plant

Clarke examined the speciation based on land snails of the genus Partula on volcanic islands of the eastern Pacific in the 1960s and the grove snail ( Cepaea nemoralis ) in England. In 1962 he coined the term apostatic selection : prey animals that differ in appearance from the majority of their conspecifics and thus fall out of the predator's prey scheme have a selection advantage. He had found that the population of grove tapers in sand dunes near Berrow, Somerset, had shifted from the predominance of double-banded forms (1926) to single-banded forms (1962, twelve generations later). The reason was that they were increasingly hunted by thrushes, which in turn had spread due to the penetration of sea buckthorn bushes, which offered them protection from hawks. This was also used to explain, for example, the large number of phenotypes in tropical insects.

Later he dealt with evolution at the molecular level and, in contrast to the neutral theory of molecular evolution ( Motoo Kimura , JL King, Thomas Jukes and others) emphasized the role of natural selection (and especially apostatic selection).

He was one of the founders of the Population Genetics Group, which has held annual symposiums since the 1960s, and in 2004 co-founded Frozen Ark, a project that aims to freeze the DNA of endangered species and the zoological counterpart of a botanical program (Millennium Seed Bank) from Kew Gardens. From 1978 to 1985 he was editor of Heredity magazine .

Awards

In 2008 he received the Darwin Wallace Medal . He was a Fellow of the Royal Society (1982), a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2004) and the American Philosophical Society and received the Linnean Medal in 2003 and the Darwin Medal in 2010 .

literature

  • John Brookfield: Bryan Campbell Clarke (obituary) . In: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society . tape 161 , no. 1 , 2017, p. 85-94 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The genus Partula was endangered there due to another species of snail ( Euglandina rosea ) imported from Central America . This was introduced in the 1970s to combat a type of African giant snail previously introduced for human consumption. Euglandina preferred to feed on the native Partula species. Clarke ensured the survival of some Partula species by breeding them. In 1994 he was able to successfully release them in a protected part of Moorea.
  2. ^ Bryan Clarke: Balanced polymorphism and the diversity of sympathetic species . In: D. Nichols (Ed.): Taxonomy and Geography. Systematics Association, Oxford, 1962, pp. 47-70
personal data
SURNAME Clarke, Bryan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Clarke, Bryan Campbell (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British evolutionary biologist and geneticist
DATE OF BIRTH June 24, 1932
DATE OF DEATH February 27, 2014