H. Allen Orr, W&M Class of '82, '85 and
Mohamed Noor, W&M Class of '92
Receive Prestigious Linnean Society Medal

Two William and Mary alumni will be honored by the Council of the Linnean Society of London for "major advances in evolutionary biology since 1858". Professor H. Allan Orr ('82, '85) and Professor Mohamed Noor ('92) have been announced as winners of the Darwin-Wallace Medals for 2008. They are among 13 recipients of the award, which is presented every 50 years and commemorates the 150th reading of the joint Darwin - Wallace paper “On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection” at the Linnean Society of London in 1858. The Darwin-Wallace Medal was first awarded in 1908 (1 gold and 6 silver) and again in 1958 (20 in silver). The re-struck Medal has a profile of Darwin on the obverse and a full-face image of Wallace on the reverse, with the marginal inscription “LINN. SOC. LOND. 1 July 1858” on both sides.

The Linnean Society of London is the world’s oldest active biological society. Founded in 1788, the Society takes its name from the great Swedish naturalist, Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) who developed the system of binomial nomenclature. The President of the Society, Professor David F Cutler, will award medals on Thursday 12th February 2009, the 200th birthday of Charles Robert Darwin, to: Professor Nick Barton FRS,  Professor M W Chase FRS, FLS, Professor B C Clarke FRS, FLS, Professor Joseph Felsenstein, the late Professor Stephen Jay Gould, Professor P R Grant FRS, FLS, Dr Rosemary Grant FRS, Professor J L B Mallet FLS, Professor Lynn Margulis FLS, the late Professor John Maynard-Smith FRS, FLS, Professor Mohamed Noor, Professor H Allen Orr and Professor Linda Partridge FRS. The medals will be presented on Darwin’s 200th birthday, 12th February 2009.

Quoting from the Linnean Society announcement:

Professor H. Allen Orr
Professor Orr's innovative combination of studies on the biology of Drosophila and theoretical work proved the "dominance theory" explanation of Haldane's Rule. He showed definitively that deleterious hybrid effects were largely recessive, explaining why the hemizygous (XY) sex suffers most. He then modelled evolution towards adaptive optima, and showed that a few single gene effects would always be large, a result which other population geneticists thought they had ruled out, but is central to our current understanding of how evolution works. His recent work shows how speciation may be caused by "Dobzhansky-Müller incompatibilities". With Professor Jerry Coyne, he published the definitive book Speciation (2004), and he contributes many important popular articles and lectures defending evolution against creationism and intelligent design.

Professor Mohamed Noor
Professor Noor  specialises in  Drosophila evolution and is currently a Professor at Duke University. He stands out as the first scientist to demonstrate "reinforcement" experimentally; i.e. that species diverge as a result of natural selection against deleterious hybridization. He recently proved a new model of speciation that predicted chromosomal rearrangements trap divergently selected variation, this model is. In 2007 he contributed to sequencing the genomes of twelve Drosophila species, work that was published in Nature and that has become the benchmark for the emerging field of metagenomics. He holds many honours and editorial posts, such as principal editor for the international journal Evolution and has authored over 100 publications.