Allan Wilson: Evolutionary

This small documentary is an overdue recognition of a New Zealand-born scientist who, in an academic life spent entirely in the United States, revolutionised the field of evolutionary biology, in the process upending most of the cherished assumptions of everything from paleoanthropology to ornithology.

Born and raised on a farm near Pukekohe, Wilson (who died of leukemia in 1991) was educated at King's College. Working in the US, particularly at UC Berkeley, he developed a way of quantifying evolutionary change by charting the accumulation of mutations in genes: his method, dubbed the "molecular clock", enabled him to "read" proteins in tissue, allowing him to extrapolate from genetic difference the time since the species had diverged.

Thus, without reference to the fossil record which had always been regarded as the only authoritative evidence, he rewrote history. Wilson's battles for acceptance may not have been on the heroic scale of Galileo's or Jenner's but he was, for a long time, a man whose story was untold. [Source: NZ Herald]

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