Adam Eyre-Walker facts for kids

Adam C. Eyre-Walker is a British scientist who studies evolution. He is an expert in how living things change over time, especially at a tiny level, like inside our cells. He is currently a Professor of Biology at the University of Sussex. Professor Eyre-Walker is famous for helping us understand evolution in the smallest parts of life. He also helped create ways to use information from DNA to learn about how living things have evolved.

Early Life and Education

Adam Eyre-Walker went to the University of Nottingham for his first degree. Then, he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh. His Ph.D. research, finished in 1992, was about how DNA changes in mammals. He joined the University of Sussex in 1997.

What Does He Research?

Professor Eyre-Walker's research focuses on how life changes at a molecular level. This means he looks at the tiny parts inside cells, like DNA. He studies how often and in what ways genetic mutations happen. Mutations are small changes in DNA. He uses math and statistics to analyze DNA information. This helps him understand how evolution works.

He once said that a big mystery in evolution is how much change happens because of "adaptive evolution." This is when living things change to better fit their environment. He has spent much of his career trying to answer this question. He believes that adaptive evolution plays a big role in many species.

How Scientists Work

In 2013, Professor Eyre-Walker and Nina Stoletzki published interesting research. They looked at how good scientists are at judging each other's work. They found that scientists are not always great at knowing how important a paper is. They also said that how many times a paper is mentioned by other scientists might not show how good it is. They concluded that while scientists are probably the best judges of science, they are "pretty bad at it."

Two years later, Professor Eyre-Walker and his team studied scientific laboratories. They wanted to find out the best size for a lab. They looked at data from nearly 400 different labs. Their research showed that bigger labs often produce more scientific papers. They also found that bigger labs publish in more important journals and get more mentions from other scientists.

Awards and Honors

Professor Eyre-Walker has received several important awards for his work. In 2002, he won the Balfour Prize from the Genetics Society. He also received the President's award from the European Society for Evolutionary Biology in 2012. In 2020, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. This is a very high honor for scientists in the United Kingdom.