{"id":39832,"date":"2011-04-20T00:35:00","date_gmt":"2011-04-20T08:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=11037"},"modified":"2011-04-20T00:35:00","modified_gmt":"2011-04-20T08:35:00","slug":"john-gillespie-%e2%80%9cthe-evil-scientist-from-america%e2%80%9d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/04\/20\/john-gillespie-%e2%80%9cthe-evil-scientist-from-america%e2%80%9d\/","title":{"rendered":"John Gillespie, \u201cthe evil scientist from America\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

I own a book of Motoo Kimura’s collected papers<\/a>, and of course I have a copy of John Gillespie’s Population Genetics: A Concise Guide<\/a>. But I’d forgotten the acrimony between the two men. Gillespie has been retired for half a decade now, while Kimura died in in 1994. I randomly stumbled onto an old newspaper story from 1992 covering the feud between these two eminent population geneticsts, Scientists in Open War over “Neutral Theory” of Genetics<\/a>. It was in the Sacramento Bee<\/i>, which is based near Gillespie’s university. The background is that both were principals in the “neutralist\u2013selectionist” debate<\/a> of the 1970s and 1980s. Kimura was one of the main theoretical architects of the neutral theory of molecular evolution<\/a>, which eventually spread its influence to the point where old-line adaptationists such as Richard Dawkins had to offer up a counter-argument.<\/p>\n

Some choice bits:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n

That was the beginning of John Gillespie’s problems with Kimura. He reviewed the Japanese scientist’s book for the prestigious journal Science. Gillespie was annoyed by the tone of Kimura’s book: “He devoted an entire chapter to telling us that he had saved us from ourselves.” The UC Davis scientist complained about it in the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I own a book of Motoo Kimura’s collected papers, and of course I have a copy of John Gillespie’s Population Genetics: A Concise Guide. But I’d forgotten the acrimony between the two men. Gillespie has been retired for half a decade no…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1257,1258,1259,1260,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genetics","category-john-gillespie","category-motoo-kimura","category-neutral-theory","category-neutralist-selectionist-debates","category-population-genetics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39832"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39892,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39832\/revisions\/39892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}