Congratulations to Jim Mallet on winning the Darwin-Wallace medal of the Linnean Society. The award is only made every 50 years, which means the rest of us need to wait until 2059 if we want a shot at it. The medal honours those who have made the most significant contributions to evolutionary biology over the last 50 years. Thirteen medals were awarded, and the other winners this time around included Bryan Clarke, Joseph Felsenstein, Stephen Jay Gould, Peter Grant and John Maynard Smith. All very prestigious.
Another of the winners was Nick Barton, who also worked with Jim on Heliconius hybrid zones in the late 1980’s when they were both at UCL (Jim was a postdoc with Nick). Apparently, Nick visited Tarapoto, Peru during the fieldwork – after months of carrying butterflies across treacherous terrain for release on the other side of the hybrid zone, Jim was getting depressed at lack of progress (a familiar feeling to anyone who has spent long periods in the field). Nick turned up and did a quick likelihood calculation on the back of an envelope to show that the mark-release-recapture experiment was showing significant selection and all was well. In those days Tarapoto was a pretty remote place…
Anyway, if you want to know more about the linnean society medals, have a look at their press release.
Winners of the Darwin-Wallace Medal, 2009
Don’t worry, they’re going to make the medal easier, and I think some will be awarded every year, from 2010, so you can all have a shot at it before you’re 80 or whatever! jim
A very worthy list of winners indeed (including my major professor and several friends), but was surprised that Lande and/or Arnold were not included.
Belated congragulations…Really enjoyed reading your 95 piece with L. Gilbert “Why are there so many mimicry rings?…”