Portal:New Zealand/Selected article/Week 39, 2006

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New Zealander Allan Wilson (1934–1991) was a pioneer in the use of molecular approaches to understand evolutionary change and reconstruct phylogenies. He was one of the most controversial figures in post-war biology.

Allan Wilson first came to world attention when he published a paper titled Immunological Time-Scale For Human Evolution in Science magazine in December 1967. Wilson argued that the origins of the human species could be seen through, what he termed, a "molecular clock". This was a way of dating, not from fossils, but from the genetic mutations that had accumulated since they parted from a common ancestor. The molecular clock estimated the length of time from divergence, given a certain rate of change.

In the early 1980s, as his findings for the age of the proto-humans were starting to be more widely accepted, Wilson again dropped a bombshell on traditional anthropological thinking with his best known work on the so-called "Mitochondrial Eve" hypothesis.