Ford Doolittle
W. Ford Doolittle (born 1942 in Urbana, Illinois) is a biochemist. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.[1] He is also the winner of the 2014 Herzberg Medal of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. [2]
Doolittle has made significant contributions to the study of cyanobacteria. He found evidence for the endosymbiont origins of chloroplasts, and developed a theoretical basis for the initial evolution of eukaryotes. He has shown the importance of horizontal gene transfer in prokaryotic evolution.
As of 2005, he is a professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.[3] He received his BA in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard University in 1963 and his PhD from Stanford University in 1967.
In 1981, Doolittle received some level of notoriety for his article in The CoEvolution Quarterly entitled "Is Nature Really Motherly?". This was a sharp rebuttal of J. E. Lovelock's formulation of the Gaia Theory. Doolittle's article is often cited by Lovelock's critics.
Because of his philosophical musings on the non-existence of an all-encompassing Tree of Life, Doolittle has occasionally been cited on Intelligent Design blogs. However, though Doolittle argues that a bifurcating tree is not an adequate metaphor for the evolution of life on earth, he is not a supporter of Intelligent Design. A single common ancestor and tree relating all of life on earth is not a necessary component of the theory of descent with modification, the essence of evolution.
In addition to his contributions to evolutionary biology, Doolittle is an artist who studied at NSCAD University, achieving a BA in photography.
References
External links
- Personal homepage at Dalhousie University
- Doolittle Lab website at Dalhousie University
- W. Ford Doolittle (2004). "W. Ford Doolittle". Curr. Biol. 14 (5): R176–R177. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2004.02.010. PMID 15028226.
- Brown, James R.; Doolittle, W. Ford (1997). "Archaea and the prokaryote-to-eukaryote transition". Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews 61 (4): 456–502. PMC 232621. PMID 9409149.
- Doolittle, W. Ford (1999). "Phylogenetic Classification and the Universal Tree". Science 284 (5423): 2124–2129. doi:10.1126/science.284.5423.2124. PMID 10381871.
- Baldauf, S. L.; Roger, A. J.; Wenk-Siefert, I.; Doolittle, W. Ford (2000). "A Kingdom-Level Phylogeny of Eukaryotes Based on Combined Protein Data". Science 290 (5493): 972–977. doi:10.1126/science.290.5493.972. PMID 11062127.
- W.F.Doolittle on Google Scholar
- Taking an axe to the Tree of Life, an article describing Doolittle's views on updating Darwin's theory.