Razib had intended to get a rough consensus of the top ten evolutionary biologists of all time based on our comments. I’m honestly surprised he didn’t succeed. I thought 10 was more than enough to get a decent sampling of the geneticists, theoreticians (usually sociobiologists), and paleontologists who’ve been crucial to our field. It wasn’t apparently. Perhaps I thought so because as a (half-trained) bioanthropologist I’m in a theory-impoverished empirical-finding-rich field.

Here’s what he had to say:

On the one hand, the discipline was too broadly construed. Biases creep in. On the other hand, the category was too narrow in that many scientists contributed to evolutionary biology without being evolutionary biologists (most trivally G.H. Hardy). Since many readers of this weblog are highly credentialized in some particular field, I invite all to:

1) State a category where you know your shit (e.g., “evolutionary developmental biology of three-toed sloths”)

2) Your list of “top 10″

1) Tough one. M.Sc Human Evolution and Behavior, University College London. Basically bioanthropology. But my focus is on neotropical primates, which I’m pretty fanatical about. I don’t think there are 10 neotropical primate specialists that have contributed substantially to theory, period. Although they have done fine work in supporting and disproving extant theory, they just haven’t added much to our greater understanding of biology, which I think is crucial to any ‘top ten’. Warren G. Kinzey did some brilliant work on island forests, sexual selection, and allopatric speciation. You probably haven’t heard of him. I only know of him because I do New World Monkeys. If I did Old World Monkeys, Apes, and/or Dead People, I wouldn’t know him either. Plus he died younger than he should have. Bioanthropology on the whole–although there are more great minds to turn to–simply hasn’t contributed enough to theory. Mammalian Sociobiology it is, then.

2) My Top Ten
1. Edward O. Wilson - More a popularizer than anything else, his text is not only a great reference and resource, but got the movement off the ground. Since its birth, the movement has had several names and a few bastard offspring (evolutionary psych for one). But it has continued to heighten our understanding of the complexity of animal behavior. Personally, I also think sociobiological principles can ultimately inform the philosophy and structure of political systems.

2. W.D. Hamilton - The guy who came up with Kin Selection in 1964, thus providing us a mechanism that could help explain everything from the evolution of hive ’superorganisms’ to grandmothers. Kin selection, more than any other principle, is the impetus behind the development of ever more complex social and mating systems.

3. Robert Trivers - Some quibble over the importance of reciprocal altruism. Having watched it firsthand in (unfortunately captive) monkeys, I don’t doubt its existence or its importance to social structure. Razib objected to his inclusion on the grounds that kin selection is ‘more important’ (something like that IIRC). I’ll grant him that. And it’s certainly far and away more important when it comes to understanding the genetic side of evolution. But as a behavioral ecologist, I can tell you for a fact that the range of behaviors and interactions you can see among social mammals would not exist were it not for reciprocal altruism. Beyond that there was his classic on Parental Investment and Sexual Selection. I’m not going to start talking about that because I won’t stop (I’m involved in paternal care stuff). Because, like kin selection, both of these principles are unequivocally crucial to the development and understanding social complexity, I think Trivers not only deserves inclusion but deserves to be very high up on the list.

4. John Maynard Smith - Evolution and the Theory of Games (1982). ‘Nuff Said. For those who aren’t familiar with the work (and I admit I myself have only skimmed it), in it Maynard Smith brings together a culmination of work over the preceding decade in which a way to mathematically model the evolution of behavior is developed. The beautiful thing about the work of Maynard Smith et al. is that they were able to describe behavior in mathematical terms without overly reducing it (as genetics can be prone to do) until the complexity of it is lost.

5. Amotz Zahavi - The Handicap Principle. A signal should be costly to produce, broadcast, and/or maintain. The traditional example are the Birds of Paradise. A male’s long tail makes it difficult for him to start flying. In other words he has a tougher time getting away from a predator. So a male that has a nice long tail and doesn’t get eaten is essentially the same thing as a guy claiming he can tie one hand behind his back and still beat you up…and then goes on to do it. Actually Maynard Smith was involved in this stuff too, come to think of it.

6. Emlen & Oring - Ecology, Sexual Selection, and the Evolution of Mating Systems. Couldn’t and didn’t want to separate these two. I was lucky enough to have Emlen as a professor for a couple of classes in undergrad. But because he did a lot of naked mole rat work, and I found those animals boring, I didn’t take advantage of this fact. I was 17, so give me a break damn you. Little did I know that just a couple years later I’d be knee deep in exactly this all encompassing problem, just with a lot cuter taxon than mole rats. I mean. Come on. Mole rats? Nevertheless, it remains an important work because they didn’t treat mating system as just another heritable phenotypic characteristic. Instead they took an ecological perspective, furthering our understanding of how mating systems are determined by the circumstances surrounding the individuals rather than anything intrinsic. I just presented an extremely oversimplified surface treatment. You do not want me to go on. Trust me.

7. Richard Wrangham. The Evolution of Female-Bonded Primate Groups. Another extremely biased choice here. Wrangham’s a bioanthropologist. He hasn’t always done the most ’scientific’ work (demonic males for instance), but this 1980 paper is famous for bringing the idea of ecological determination of mating system to the fore. It’s not perfect by any means. But it certainly brought primatology out of the dark ages and in line with the rest of evolutionary biology

8. Ernst Mayr. All the traditional stuff. But mainly for keeping the focus at the level of the individual. There are certain things that will probably be never understood even if we completely ‘decode’ the genome. As ‘unscientific’ as it is for me to say so, I firmly believe that there are certain ‘emergent’ properties especially when it comes to intelligent and social animals (birds, cephalopods, mammals, and sometimes I wonder about poison arrow frogs). Too much of what they do and how they act is just too developmentally labile, too context and environment dependent.

9. Theodosius Dobzhanski. I’ve just always respected the fact that fieldwork was so important to this geneticist. People working from various perspectives can lose sight of everything else. When it comes to evolutionary biology, I’m in the ‘forest research’ camp, focusing on the whole individual and its behavior. Geneticists are in the ‘tree research’ camp, choosing to focus on isolated parts of a greater whole. Both camps are necessary to understanding evolution, but sometimes they can fail to communicate and integrate properly. Dhobzanski has always come across as a man who kept his eye on both perspectives. It’s something I hope I’ll do once my research career starts.

10. Garret Hardin. Another highly biased choice. I most admire Mr. Hardin for his many statements that economics is just a subset of ecology. In a simple statement, he showed us how all the work we do in behavioral ecology, all the discussion of modelling, fitness, cheaters, bluebeards, etc can help us understand how to build a more perfect political system. It was basic ecological thinking that he applied to the Tragedy of the Commons paper

It’s important to note that while there’s some overlap with Razib’s general list, I’ve included people on here that I wouldn’t on a general top ten (Wrangham, Zahavi, Emlen/Oring). This is a list of the top ten guys as far as this particular half-trained primate behavioral ecologist is concerned. 6, 7, and 10 could be considered biased choices, even within the subfield of behavioral ecology. But I think they’re fairly valid, nonetheless.