| RefNo | EC/1993/44 |
| Level | Item |
| Title | Kimura, Motoo: certificate of election to the Royal Society |
| Date | 1992 |
| Description | Certificate of Candidate for Election to Foreign Membership. Citation typed |
| Citation | Motoo Kimura has made profound advances in population genetics and evolutionary theory spanning a period of over thirty years and on a par with those of Fisher, Wright and Haldane. His main contributions to theoretical population genetics have been in studies of stochastic processes in finite populations. In these analyses he used diffusion methods which he developed substantially so they have become a most powerful tool for population geneticists. He was the first to derive the evolution of the distribution of frequencies of neutral genes in small populations over time, and his results for the fixation probabilities of genes with selective advantages were the basis for theories of limits to artificial selection. With Ohta he derived the time taken (4N generations) for a new mutant gene to be fixed, an important result in the neutral theory. With Crow he discussed the infinite allele model and calculated expected heterozygosity in finite populations, which have become major reference points. Kimura and Ohta developed formulae for linkage disequilibrium among segregating sites, and earlier he gave formulae for two-locus inbreeding. Whilst most of Kimura's work has centred on finite populations, he also made important contributions to multi-locus natural selection theory for large populations. Thus in the 1950's and 60's Kimura had already made profound analyses of population genetics before he started the work for which he is most widely known. These influential contributions commenced with his 1968 paper in which he proposed the neutral mutation theory of molecular evolution to explain and to provide a unified theory for the data then becoming available on species divergence in protein sequences and on within species variability in electromorphs. The simple and elegant demonstration that the rate of neutral substitution equalled the mutation rate explained the constant rate of base substitution (albeit per generation) over evolutionary time and showed how heterozygosity could be maintained without fitness load. Most of his subsequent work and that of his immediate colleagues has been concerned with developing this theory and of testing hypothesis based on it. Notable among these were analyses of models of charge change for electrophoretic variants, the models of nearly neutral mutations, and derivation of distributions of allele frequency. The theory and results are reviewed by Kimura in "The neutral theory of molecular evolution" published in 1983 and already a classic text in evolutionary biology. Kimura's neutral theory has been the major stimulus to both theoreticians and experimentalists interested in evolutionary theory for over two decades and, as it is general, simple and testable, is clearly the reference point for other theories in specific cases. |
| AccessStatus | Closed |
Fellows associated with this archive
| Code | PersonName | Dates |
| NA2022 | Kimura; Motoo (1924 - 1994) | 1924 - 1994 |