Interview with John C. Avise, recipient of the 2009 Alfred Russel Wallace award

Abstract

profiles ISSN 1948‐6596 Interview with John C. Avise, recipient of the 2009 Alfred Russel Wallace award by Brett R. Riddle 1 School of Life Sciences, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA Brett R. Riddle. Wallace is considered the “Father of Biogeography”, Darwin the “Father of Evolu‐ tion”, and Linnaeus the “Father of Taxonomy”; and now you are the “Father of Phylogeography”, which admittedly is a young discipline compared to the other three. If you were to look perhaps 100 years into the future, do you have a sense that phylogeography will become a discrete disci‐ pline alongside those other three pillars in the biodiversity sciences? John C. Avise. I'm flattered (and also a bit embar‐ rassed) that you would even imagine placing my name in such lofty company. Nevertheless, I do believe that phylogeography has prompted a revolutionary way to look at the world, important enough to merit at least a bookmark in the history of science. Prior to phylogeography's emergence as a recognizable discipline in the mid‐1980s, two dominant halves of evolutionary biology had re‐ mained quite disconnected. On the one side was population genetics, a well‐established microevo‐ lutionary discipline that deals with various forces (such as natural selection and genetic drift) that can shape allelic and genotypic frequencies in con‐ specific populations. On the other side was phy‐ logenetic biology, a discipline that aims to esti‐ mate historical relationships mostly of supra‐ specific taxa. Ever since my early days in graduate school, I perceived as incredibly ironic the fact that population genetics and phylogenetic biology had extremely little contact, despite the reality that both of these academic traditions deal ulti‐ mately with the histories of genetic lineages, al‐ beit across different timescales. BRR. Ironic, I agree, and phylogeography certainly has filled the role as an integrator between those disciplines. credit phylogeography with having forged some of the earliest empirical and conceptual bridges be‐ tween micro‐ and macro‐evolutionary thought in genetics. A century from now, I suspect that phy‐ logeography will still be recognizable as a disci‐ pline, although perhaps so thoroughly integrated into evolutionary research that most biologists will simply take for granted that an emphasis on genealogy in space offers a seamless approach for connecting the evolutionary‐genetic histories of organisms below and above the level of species. BRR. Right, and that synthesis certainly is becom‐ ing more clear all the time. In your view, has phy‐ logeography been more successful in generating new questions and avenues of research because of that power of integration, or really as a new approach to addressing older questions? JCA. I think it’s some of both. Phylogeography is a conceptually bounteous discipline in the sense mentioned above, but it's also a data‐rich field that has opened highly practical ways to address biogeographic questions, many of which had ex‐ isted before but others of which (especially within species) had been formulated poorly at best. Be‐ ginning with the introduction of mitochondrial (mtDNA) data to population biology in the 1970s, geneticists finally gained empirical access to gene genealogies within as well as among species, and that’s something that had not been practicable (nor even much dreamed of) prior to the phy‐ logeographic revolution. So, phylogeography has become a spirited mix of some things old but many things new. BRR. And how do you see the conceptual and the empirical sides of phylogeography interacting with JCA. Well, that’s how I like to think of it, anyway. one another to drive the field's development? In my opinion, a proper reading of history will frontiers of biogeography 2.4, 2011 — © 2011 the authors; journal compilation © 2011 The International Biogeography Society