Roger Butlin

Roger K. Butlin (* 1955 ) is a British evolutionary biologist and geneticist .

Butlin studied from 1973 natural sciences and especially genetics at Cambridge University (Jesus College) with a bachelor's degree in 1976 and received his doctorate in genetics in 1982 at the University of Nottingham . As a post-doctoral student he was with Godfrey Hewitt at the University of East Anglia and from 1987 a Royal Society Research Fellow at the University of Wales in Cardiff. In 1992 he became a lecturer at the University of Leeds and from 1994 a reader for evolutionary biology. He is a professor at the University of Sheffield .

From 2013 to 2015 he was visiting professor at the University of Gothenburg .

He deals with the genetics of speciation, especially reproductive isolation and the controversial mechanism of reinforcement (see speciation ), especially in parapatric speciation . As a model system, he investigates insects and their acoustic and chemical signals, the inheritance of signal characteristics and female preferences in the choice of reproductive partners. In addition to insects (such as pea lice and Drosophila), he also investigates speciation and adaptation in periwinkles (genus Littorina ) and the evolution of asexual reproduction, evolution at the edges of distribution areas and their importance for nature conservation. He also researches the genetic harmfulness of the parasitic plants of the Striga genus , acoustic communication (species recognition) in bats and he researched the population genetics of various malaria-transmitted mosquitoes.

In 2015 he received the Darwin Wallace Medal . From 2013 to 2015 he was President of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology.

From 2015 he was Associate Editor of the American Naturalist and from 2009 to 2012 he was Editor of Heredity .

Fonts (selection)

• Editor with Jon R. Bridle, Dolph Schluter : Speciation and patterns of diversity. Cambridge University Press 2009
• with Juan Galindo, John W. Grahame: Sympatric, parapatric or allopatric: the most important way to classify speciation?, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 363, 2008, pp. 2997-3007.
• with others: What do we need to know about speciation?, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Volume 27, 2012, pp. 27–39.
• with GL Bush: Sympatric speciation in insects, in: Adaptive Speciation, 2012, pp. 229–248.
• with R. Abbott u. a .: Hybridization and Speciation, J. Evol. Biol., Volume 26, 2013, pp. 229-246.
• with others: Genomics and the origin of species, Nature Review Genetics, Volume 15, 2014, pp. 176-192.

Web links

• Homepage