In the comments below in regards to the great evolutionary biologists, and the “Top 10 list,” I received some good submissions. But, there is definitely (in my mind) a top tier which I am inflexible about.
Darwin – he basically invented the field as a science, made some darn good predictions (H. sapiens as an African species) and put forward ideas that are today being taken up again (sexual selection)
R.A. Fisher – Not only did he fuse Mendelian genetics with evolutionary biology (“biomemtrics”), and so lay the foundation for the Modern Synthesis, he is also the father of statistics
Sewall Wright – Though not as acute a theoretical thinker as Fisher, he brought a more grounded and empirical perspective to mathematical population genetics and shaped the perspectives of Dobzhansky & Mayr
J.B.S. Haldane – If R.A. Fisher was the strategist who had the “big picture” under control, Haldane was the quick-silver tactician, attacking problems in a sometimes ad hoc, but often ingenius manner
Theodosius Dobzhansky – He is the experimentalist in the bunch, and the mentor of Richard Lewontin, another “great,” as well as a crucial mediator of Wright’s theoretical work to other biologists
Some in the comments brought up individuals who I think need to be more well known. Russian thinkers like I. I. Schmalhausen are often forgotten because of the caprice of history (John brings him up). David points out the chronological skew in the list, the later thinkers had a lot more to work with, while to a great extent Darwin synthesized evolutionary biology from whole cloth (and presupposed some fallacious ideas, such as the blending theory of inheritance). Another individual suggested Crick & Watson. Obviously much of evolutionary genentics, and certainly genomics, are predicated on DNA, so I can see that point. But biology is predicated on physics, that doesn’t imply that Isaac Newton is a great biologist!
In any case, I would like to speak to two individuals who I assumed would come up in the message boards: Richard Dawkins and S.J. Gould. I excluded them from the list consciously: I don’t think they shine as evolutionary biologists. Dawkins is a fine philosopher of evolutionary biology. He has taken Fisherian (via Hamilton) individual level selectionism to its logical conclusion and explored its many ramifications. Gould was a very erudite historian of evolutionary biology. From what I can gather his adventures in used book stores looking for copies of untranslated German texts would make many a professional historian proud. They are both fine scholars, but that does not make them top flight scientists. Dawkins is trained as an ethologist, and he is endowed as a professor for the public understanding of science. To make a crass analogy, he is on the sales staff, not in R & D. Confusing him for W.D. Hamilton, let alone R.A. Fisher, is like assuming that the salesmen who delivers computers to your corporate headquarters could take over on designing a new chip from scratch. A salesmen can boot up the machine and show you all its neat tricks, its strengths and weaknesses, but he isn’t a Creator of the marvel de novo. With Gould the situation is different. From what I can gather Dawkins is conscious about his role as a mediator of the ideas of men like Hamilton (inclusive fitness) and J. M. Smith (hawk vs. dove), but Gould attempted to make splash in the field on his own with his “punctuated equilibrium.” He attempted to bring the insights of paleontology and higher taxon level evolutionary dynamics into the fray to supplement, and perhaps equal, genetics as the fundamental level of analysis. I don’t think he suceeded. Paleontologists like Elizabeth Vrba make use of punctuated equilibrium, but paleontology is a small corner of evolutionary biology, and that’s where Gould started out in the first place. Models of selection derived from Fisher, Wright and Haldane, assumptions of neutrality as a null hypothesis (thanks Motoo!), or innovative uses of molecular methods following in the foot-steps of Lewontin are ubiquitous in evolutionary biology. Some of Gould’s cautions about adaptionist over-reach are probably spot-on, but, this trends toward philosophy, and I don’t think he was as seminal in this process as perceived himself to be.
There is a consistent problem with the public confusing popularizers with real luminaries in fields, and this certainly has happened in evolutionary biology. In astronomy Carl Sagan is no Chandrasekhar, and in theoretical physics Stephen Hawking is no Ed Witten. Similarly, Dawkins is no Hamilton and Gould is no Wright.
In short, for those in the office who only boot up the the Word Process or do some data entry in Excel the wisdom of the salesmen might be all that needs to be acknowledged. But for those of us who wish to squeeze the most juice from the machine, we need to make sure and keep in mind the original designers.
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