Professor Bryan Campbell Clarke FRS, born in 1932, is a British geneticist. He is professor emeritus of genetics at the University of Nottingham. Clarke is particularly noted for his work on apostatic selection and other forms of frequency-dependent selection, and work on polymorphism in snails, much of it done during the 1960s. Later, he studied molecular evolution. He made the case for natural selection as an important factor in the maintenance of molecular variation, and in driving evolutionary changes in molecules through time. In doing so, he questioned the over-riding importance of random genetic drift advocated by King, Jukes, and Kimura. With Dr. JJ Murray Jnr (University of Virginia), he carried out an extensive series of studies on speciation in land snails of the genus Partula inhabiting the volcanic islands of the Eastern Pacific. These studies illuminated the genetic changes that take place during the origin of species.
Clarke was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1982, awarded the Linnean Medal for Zoology and elected a Foreign member of the American Philosophical Society in 2003.He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. He was one of thirteen recipients of the Darwin-Wallace Medal in 2008; this award is given every 50 years by the Linnean Society of London. He was awarded the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 2010 for 'for his original and influential contributions to our understanding of the genetic basis of evolution'. [1]
Professor Clarke has recently established the Frozen Ark project to preserve the DNA of endangered species worldwide.