H. Allen Orr

Harold Allen Orr (born July 11, 1960 in Hampton (Virginia) ) is an American evolutionary biologist and geneticist.

Orr studied biology and philosophy at College William and Mary with bachelor's degrees in 1982 and masters' degrees in 1985 and received his PhD in evolutionary biology and ecology from the University of Chicago in 1990 with Jerry Coyne and was a post-doctoral student at the University of California, Davis . His doctoral thesis was entitled The Genetics of Postzygotic Reproductive Isolation in Drosophila . He was Assistant Professor from 1993, Associate Professor from 1996 and Professor from 2000 at the University of Rochester , where he is Shirley Cox Kearns Professor .

He deals with population genetics, the genetics of speciation and adaptation, using Drosophila as an object of study. He investigated the genetic causes of the sterility of hybrids and which genes are responsible for species barriers and which normal functions they have. A standard work on speciation comes from him and Coyne.

In 2008 he was one of the recipients of the Darwin Wallace Medal . In 1992 he received the Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Naturalists and in 1993 the Dobzhansky Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution. He was a Guggenheim Fellow (2000/01), Packard Fellow and Sloan Fellow. In 2009 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

He served on the editorial boards of Evolution (1998-2000) and Genetical Research (1996-1996).

He writes for The Boston Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. He has publicly emerged as an opponent of intelligent design and evolutionary psychology and has taken a critical stance with William Dembski , Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins .

Fonts (selection)

• with JA Coyne: Patterns of speciation in Drosophila. Evolution, Vol. 43, 1989, pp. 362-381.
• A test of Fisher's theory of dominance. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 88, 1991, pp. 11413-11415.
• Haldane's rule has multiple genetic causes. Nature, Volume 361, 1993, pp. 532-533.
• The population genetics of speciation: the evolution of hybrid incompatibilities. Genetics, Volume 139 1995, pp. 1805-1813.
• A mathematical model of Haldane's rule. Evolution, Volume 47 1993, pp. 1606-1611.
• with Jerry A. Coyne: The evolutionary genetics of speciation. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B, vol. 353, 1998, pp. 287-305.
• The population genetics of adaptation: the distribution of factors fixed during adaptive evolution. Evolution, Vol. 52, 1998, pp. 935-949.
• with D C- Presgraves: Haldane's rule is obeyed in taxa lacking a hemizygous X. Science, Volume 282, 1998, pp. 952-954.
• with CR Marshall, NH Patel: Morphological innovation and developmental genetics. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 96, 1999, pp. 9995-9996.
• with S. Irving: Complex epistasis and the genetic basis of hybrid sterility in the Drosophila pseudoobscura Bogota-USA hybridization. Genetics, Vol 158, 2001, pp. 1089-1100.
• with M. Turelli: The evolution of postzygotic isolation: accumulating Dobzhansky-Muller incompatibilities. Evolution, Vol. 55, 2001, pp. 1085-1094.
• The population genetics of adaptation: the adaptation of DNA sequences. Evolution, Vol. 56, 2002, pp. 1317-1330.
• with DC Presgraves, L. Balagopalan, SM Abmayr: Adaptive evolution drives divergence of a hybrid inviability gene in Drosophila. Nature, Vol. 423, 2003, pp. 715-719.
• with Jerry A. Coyne: Speciation, Sinauer Assoc. 2004
• The genetic theory of adaptation: a brief history. Nature Reviews Genetics, Volume 6 2005, pp. 119-127.
• with S. Irving: Segregation distortion in hybrids between the Bogota and USA subspecies of Drosophila pseudoobscura. Genetics, Volume 169, 2005, pp. 671-682.
• with JP Masly, CD Jones, MAF Noor, J. Locke: Gene transposition as a cause of hybrid sterility. Science, Vol. 313, 2006, pp. 1448-1450.

Web links

• Homepage, University of Rochester
• Biography, prabook