Peter Raymond Grant

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Peter Raymond Grant (born October 26, 1936 in London ) is a British evolutionary biologist and zoologist. He was a professor at Princeton University .

Cactus finch

Career and awards

Grant studied zoology at Cambridge University with a bachelor's degree in 1960 and a doctorate in 1964. He was a post-doctoral student at Yale University in 1964/65 . From 1965 he was an assistant professor and later professor at McGill University , where he stayed until 1977. He was then a professor at the University of Michigan and from 1985 at Princeton University.

In 1981 and 1985 he was visiting professor at Uppsala and 2010 at Yale.

Grant and his wife Barbara Rosemary Grant undertook decades of field studies (over 35 years) on a classic object of evolutionary biology since Charles Darwin , the Darwin's finches on the uninhabited Galapagos island of Daphne Major . They demonstrated the rapid evolutionary change in phenotype in these finches; this supports Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

In 1983 he received the William Brewster Medal of the American Ornithologists' Union , in 1998 the EO Wilson Prize, in 2002 the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society, in 2008 the Darwin Wallace Medal , in 2005 the Balzan Prize in Population Biology and in 2009 the Kyoto Prize . He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (1987), the Royal Society of Canada , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , the American Philosophical Society , the National Academy of Sciences (external member) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science . He holds honorary doctorates from Uppsala (1986), the University of Zurich, Ohio Wesleyan University and McGill University and is an external member of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala. In 1996 he received the Humboldt Research Award and in 1985/86 he was a Guggenheim Fellow. In 1999 he was President of the American Society of Naturalists. In 2003 he became an honorary member of the German Ornithological Society. For 2017, he and his wife were awarded the Royal Medal and the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award .

He has been married to Barbara Rosemary Grant since 1962 and has two daughters with her.

Fonts

  • with B. Grant, JNM Smith, IJ Abbott, LK Abbott Darwin's finches: Population variation and natural selection , Proc. National Academy of Sciences USA, Vol. 73, 1976, pp. 257-261.
  • with B. Grant: Darwin's finches: Population variation and sympatric speciation , Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 76, 1979, pp. 2359-2363.
  • with B. Grant Evolutionary Dynamics of a Natural Population: The Large Cactus Finch of the Galápagos , University of Chicago Press, 1989
  • with B. Grant Unpredictable evolution in a 30-year study of Darwin's finches , Science, Volume 296, 2002, pp. 707-711.
  • with B. Grant Evolution of character displacement in Darwin's finches , Science, Volume 313, 2006, pp. 224-226.
  • with B. Grant How and Why Species Multiply: The Radiation of Darwin's Finches Princeton University Press, 2008

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
personal data
SURNAME Grant, Peter Raymond
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Grant, Peter R.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British biologist
DATE OF BIRTH October 26, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH London