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JOE FELSENSTEIN has had an nonstandard career in which his name is connected to
two actual contributions to systematics -- as a student, he trapped the first
Southern Bog Lemming (Clethrionomys gapperi) ever found on Mount Desert Island,
Maine. He also has a small moth species found in Arizona named after him. His
original training was in theoretical population genetics, and he is proud to
have been the first person to publish the fact that if fitnesses multiply
across loci, then if there is no linkage disequilibrium initially, none is
expected to arise by natural selection. He is Professor in the Department of
Genome Sciences and in the Department of Biology at the University of
Washington, where has been a faculty member for the past 46 years. He has been
working on statistical inference of phylogenies since about 1966, publishing
his first papers on this 40 years ago. His work on maximum likelihood inference
of phylogenies, on bootstrap methods for phylogenies, and on sampling methods
for likelihood inference with coalescents is too well known to be cited
accurately. He is loathed by hard-core members of the Willi Hennig Society. He
has been distributing his phylogeny program package, PHYLIP, for 33 years, and
for most of that time has been patiently responding to user questions by urging
the users to read the documentation. His recent work is on evolutionary
quantitative genetics on phylogenies. He is a member of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy of Sciences. He was awarded the
President's Award for Excellence in Systematics by the Society of Systematic
Biologists, the Weldon Medal for Biometry of the University of Oxford, the
Distinguished Scientist's Award by the American Institute of Biological
Sciences, the McCarty Award for the Advancement of Sciences by the National
Academy of Sciences, the Darwin-Wallace Award by the Linnean Society, as well
as an honorary degree of Doctor of Science by the University of Edinburgh. He
has written the most cited paper in Evolution, the most-cited paper in
Cladistics, the second-most-cited paper in The American Naturalist, and the
second-most-cited paper in the Journal of Molecular Evolution. He has been
President of the Society for the Study of Evolution, and imagines that he could
be President of the SMBE, even though he has not yet learned the names of all
20 amino acids.
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