- Pz Myers
Paul Zachary "PZ" Myers (born March 9 1957) is an American biology professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris and a science blogger via his blog, "Pharyngula" (previously "Pharyngula.org"). He is currently an associate professor of biology at Morris, works in the field of evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), and has a particular interest in cephalopods.
- Richard Dawkins
Clinton Richard Dawkins (born March 26, 1941) is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and popular science writer who holds the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. Dawkins first came to prominence with his 1976 book "The Selfish Gene", which popularised the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the term meme into the lexicon, helping found memetics.
- Rupert Sheldrake
Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than 75 scientific papers and ten books. A former Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he studied natural sciences at Cambridge University, where he was a Scholar of Clare College, took a double first class honours degree and was awarded the University Botany Prize. He then studied philosophy at Harvard University, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow, before returning to Cambridge, where he took a Ph.D. in biochemistry.
- Craig Venter
J. Craig Venter (born John Craig Venter October 14, 1946, Salt Lake City) is an American biologist and businessman.
- Jane Goodall
Dame Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE, UN Messenger of Peace, (born April 3, 1934) is an English primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist. She is best-known for her study of chimpanzee social and family life in Gombe Stream National Park for 45 years, and for founding the Jane Goodall Institute.
- Ernst Mayr
Ernst Walter Mayr (July 5, 1904, Kempten, Germany - February 3, 2005, Bedford, Massachusetts U.S.), was one of the 20th century's leading evolutionary biologists. He was also a renowned taxonomist, tropical explorer, ornithologist, historian of science, and naturalist. His work contributed to the conceptual revolution that led to the modern evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics, systematics, and Darwinian evolution, …
- Jared Diamond
Jared Mason Diamond (b. 10 September, 1937) is an American evolutionary biologist, physiologist, biogeographer and nonfiction author. Diamond works as a professor of geography at UCLA. He is best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" (1997). He also received the National Medal of Science in 1999
- Paul Ehrlich
Paul Ehrlich (March 14, 1854 - August 20, 1915) was a German scientist who won the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He is noted for his work in hematology, immunology, and chemotherapy. Ehrlich predicted autoimmunity calling it "horror autotoxicus". He coined the term "chemotherapy" and popularized the concept of a "magic bullet".
- Louis Pasteur
Louis Pasteur (December 27 1822 - September 28 1895) was a French chemist best known for his remarkable breakthroughs in microbiology. His experiments confirmed the germ theory of disease, also reducing mortality from puerperal fever (childbed), and he created the first vaccine for rabies. He is best known to the general public for showing how to stop milk and wine from going sour - this process came to be called "pasteurization".
- Ernst Haeckel
Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel, also written von Haeckel, was an eminent German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist. Ernst Haeckel named thousands of new species (see below), mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including "phylum", "phylogeny", "ecology" and the kingdom "Protista" (details below).
- Gregor Mendel
Gregor Johann Mendel (July 20, 1822 - January 6, 1884) was a Moravian Augustinian priest and scientist often called the "father of modern genetics" for his study of the inheritance of traits in pea plants. Mendel showed that the inheritance of traits follows particular laws, which were later named after him. The significance of Mendel's work was not recognised until the turn of the 20th century. Its rediscovery prompted the foundation of genetics
- Alfred Russel Wallace
Alfred Russel Wallace OM, FRS (8 January 1823 - 7 November 1913) was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist. He did extensive fieldwork first in the Amazon River basin, and then in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the Wallace line dividing the fauna of Australia from that of Asia.
- Julian Huxley
Sir Julian Sorell Huxley, FRS (June 22, 1887 - February 14, 1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, author, humanist and internationalist, known for his popularisations of science in books and lectures. He was the first director of UNESCO, founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, and was knighted in 1958. Huxley came from the distinguished Huxley family. His brother was the writer Aldous Huxley, and half-brother a fellow biologist and Nobel laureate, …
- Lynn Margulis
Dr. Lynn Margulis (born March 15, 1938) is a biologist and University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is best known for her theory on the origin of eukaryotic organelles, and her contributions to the endosymbiotic theory-which is now generally accepted for how certain organelles were formed.
- Richard Lewontin
Richard Charles "Dick" Lewontin (born March 29, 1929) is an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist and social commentator. A leader in developing the mathematical basis of population genetics and evolutionary theory, he pioneered the notion of using techniques from molecular biology such as gel electrophoresis to apply to questions of genetic variation and evolution. In a pair of 1966 papers co-authored with J.L. Hubby in the journal "Genetics", …
- James Lovelock
Dr James Ephraim Lovelock, CH, CBE, FRS (born 26 July 1919) is an independent scientist, author, researcher, environmentalist, and futurologist who lives in Devon, in the south west of Great Britain. He is known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, in which he postulates that the Earth functions as a kind of superorganism.
- John Maynard Smith
Professor John Maynard Smith, F.R.S. (6 January 1920 - 19 April 2004) was a British evolutionary biologist and geneticist. Originally an aeronautical engineer during the Second World War, he then took a second degree in genetics under the well-known biologist J.B.S. Haldane. Maynard Smith was instrumental in the application of game theory to evolution and theorised on other problems such as the evolution of sex and signaling theory.
- Thomas Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley PC, FRS (4 May 1825 Ealing – 29 June 1895 Eastbourne, Sussex) was an English biologist, known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Huxley's famous 1860 debate with the Lord Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, was a key moment in the wider acceptance of evolution, and in his own career. Wilberforce was coached by Richard Owen, against whom Huxley also debated on whether man was closely related to apes.
- Theodosius Dobzhansky
Theodosius Grygorovych Dobzhansky (Ukrainian - Теодосій Григорович Добжанський; sometimes anglicized to Theodore Dobzhansky; January 25, 1900 - December 18, 1975) was a noted geneticist and evolutionary biologist. Dobzhansky was born in Ukraine (then part of Imperial Russia) and emigrated to the United States in 1927.
- Sewall Wright
Sewall Green Wright ForMemRS (December 21, 1889 – March 3, 1988) was an American geneticist known for his influential work on evolutionary theory. Along with R. A. Fisher and J.B.S. Haldane, he was a founder of theoretical population genetics. Evolutionary biologists argue as to whether Fisher or Wright made the greater contribution. He is the discoverer of the inbreeding coefficient and of methods of computing it in pedigrees.
- Jonas Salk
Jonas Edward Salk (October 28 1914 - June 23, 1995) was an American physician and researcher best known for the development of the first successful polio vaccine (the eponymous "Salk vaccine"). During his life he worked in New York, Michigan, Pittsburgh and California. In his later career, Salk devoted much energy toward the development of an AIDS vaccine. Salk did not seek wealth or fame through his innovations, famously stating, …
- Ian Wilson
Ian Wilson is a professor at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, United States. The team he led was reported by the 6 February, 2004 edition of Science magazine to had managed to synthesise the hemagglutinin protein responsible for the 1918 outbreak of Spanish Flu.
- David Haig
David Haig, is an Australian evolutionary biologist and geneticist, professor in Harvard Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. He is interested in intragenomic conflict, genomic imprinting and parent-offspring conflict, and wrote the book Genomic Imprinting and Kinship.
- John Murray
Sir John Murray KCB (3 March 1841 – 6 March 1914) was a pioneering Scots-Canadian oceanographer and marine biologist. Murray was born at Cobourg, Ontario, Canada, to Scottish parents who had emigrated seven years earlier. He returned to Scotland to study, firstly at Stirling High School, and then at the University of Edinburgh, but soon left to join a whaling expedition to Spitsbergen as ships' surgeon in 1868.
- Stuart Kauffman
Stuart Alan Kauffman (born September 28, 1939) is a theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher, who has given much thought to the origin of life on Earth. He is best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from self-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection.
- Massimo Pigliucci
As professor of ecology and evolution, he does research and teaching at SUNY-Stony Brook when he is not pursuing his interests in philosophy of science at the same institution.
- Steve Jones
Steve Jones (born March 24, 1944) is a professor of genetics at Galton laboratory of University College London. He is also a television presenter and a prize-winning author on the subject of biology, especially evolution. He is one of the best known contemporary popular writers on evolution. His popular writing shows a wry, sometimes rather dark, sense of humour. In 1996 his writing won him the Royal Society Michael Faraday prize ``for his numerous, …
- David Sloan Wilson
David Sloan Wilson (1949-) is an American evolutionary biologist. Son of the author Sloan Wilson, David Sloan Wilson is a distinguished professor at Binghamton University. He is a prominent proponent of the concept of group selection in evolution. He has, along with Elliott Sober in their book "Unto Others" proposed a framework called multilevel selection theory, which incorporates the more orthodox approach of gene-level selection and individual selection.
- Graham Bell
Graham Bell is a contemporary evolutionary biologist with interests in the evolution of sexual reproduction and the maintenance of variation. Bell is presently at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He developed the "Tangled Bank" theory of evolutionary genetics after observing the asexual and sexual behavior patterns of Aphids as well as monogonont rotifers.
- Ian Wilmut
IAN WILMUT, professor and Head of the Department of Gene Expression and Development at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, Scotland, is uniquely qualified both as a pioneer in the science of cloning and as a participant in the public discussions of its possible social and ethical consequences. He is the leader of the team that produced Dolly the sheep in 1996, the first animal to be cloned from an adult cell.
- Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Elsie Franklin was an English physical chemist and crystallographer who made important contributions to the understanding of the fine structures of DNA, viruses, coal and graphite. Franklin is best known for her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA which formed a basis of Watson and Crick's hypothesis of the double helical structure of DNA in their 1953 publication, and when published constituted critical evidence of the hypothesis.
- Barbara McClintock
Barbara McClintock was a pioneering American scientist and one of the world's most distinguished cytogeneticists. McClintock received her PhD in botany from Cornell University in 1927, where she was a leader in the development of maize cytogenetics. The field remained the focus of her research for the rest of her career. From the late 1920s, McClintock studied chromosomes and how they change during reproduction in maize.
- Joan Roughgarden
Joan Roughgarden spent her early childhood in the Philippine Islands and Indonesia. She majored in biology and philosophy at the University of Rochester, and received a Ph.D. in theoretical ecology from Harvard University. She is Professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford University, and author of five books and over 120 papers in academic journals. She founded and directed the Earth Systems Program at Stanford, and was awarded for service to undergraduate education.
- David Baltimore
David Baltimore (b. March 7, 1938) is an American biologist and one of the recipients of the 1975 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. He is currently the Robert A. Millikan Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he was the president from 1997 to 2006. He is also currently the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Baltimore was born in New York City.
- Kenneth R. Miller
Kenneth R. Miller (born 1948) is a biology professor at Brown University. Miller, who is Roman Catholic, is particularly known for his opposition to creationism, including the intelligent design movement. He has written a book on the subject entitled "Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution", in which he furthers the argument that a belief in God and evolution are not mutually exclusive.
- Jacques Monod
Jacques Lucien Monod was a French biologist who was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965. Born in Paris, he was also awarded several other honours and distinctions, among them the Légion d'honneur. Monod (along with François Jacob) is famous for his work on the Lac operon. Study of the control of expression of genes in the Lac operon provided the first example of a transcriptional regulation system.
- John Baker
Dr. John Randal Baker F.R.S. (1900-1984) was a biologist, physical anthropologist, and professor at the University of Oxford (where he was the Emeritus Reader in Cytology) in the mid-twentieth century. He is best remembered for his 1974 book "Race", which attempts to classify human races in the same way that animal subspecies are classified. In "Race", Baker explores the nature of civilization, giving 23 criteria that can readily identify them.
- Dian Fossey
Dian Fossey (January 16, 1932 - December 27, 1985) was an American Zoologist who completed an extended study of several gorilla groups. She observed them daily for years in the mountain forests of Rwanda, initially encouraged to work there by famous paleontologist Louis Leakey. Her work is somewhat similar to Jane Goodall's work with chimpanzees.
- Tim Flannery
Professor Timothy Fridtjof Flannery (born 28 January 1956) is an Australian mammologist, palaeontologist and global warming activist. Flannery was named Australian of the Year in 2007 and presently an adjunct professor at Macquarie University. His controversial views on shutting down conventional coal burning for electricity in the medium term are frequently cited in the media.
- Carolus Linnaeus
Carl Linnaeus, Latinized as Carolus Linnaeus, also known after his ennoblement as, (May 23, 1707 – January 10, 1778), was a Swedish botanist, physician and zoologist who laid the foundations for the modern scheme of nomenclature. He is known as the "father of modern taxonomy." He is also considered one of the fathers of modern ecology (see History of ecology). He was the most renowned botanist of his time, …