New Zealand-born American
biochemist Allan Charles Wilson (1934鈥�1991) helped establish
molecular evolution as a major field of biology. Wilson
used comparisons of proteins and DNA to investigate
evolutionary relationships and rates of molecular change. He
grew up near Auckland, New Zealand, and completed his
doctorate in biochemistry at the University of California,
Berkeley, in 1961, where he joined the faculty in 1964.
In 1967, he and Vincent
Sarich used evidence from immunological comparisons of serum
albumin to argue that humans and African apes last shared a
common ancestor ~ 5 MYA, far more recently than many
anthropologists then accepted. The subsequent discovery of the
Australopithecus fossil "Lucy" showed
this to be correct. His 1975 comparison of protein
electrophoretic data from Chimpanzees and Humans showed them
to be 98.6% similar, and suggested that morphological
differences between the two were due to gene regulation rather
than protein structural differences. His 1987 analysis of
restriction maps of mitochondrial DNA, with Rebecca
Cann and Mark Stoneking, supported a recent African origin
< 200 KYA for the common maternal ancestor of contemporary
humanity. The popular name 鈥�mitochondrial Eve鈥�
obscured the fact that she was neither the first nor the only
woman of her time in Africa, rather the common coalescent
ancestor through whom all present human maternal lineages
converge. Wilson pioneered DNA research on extinct
organisms, notably a 1984 study of the quagga with
Russell Higuchi and colleagues. His postdoctoral student
Svante 笔盲盲产辞 received
the Nobel Prize (2022) for extension of this work to
Neanderthals. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1986, the
only New Zealander to do so.