Fungi, Lorraine Phelan, Flickr

SFI Science Board member Marcus Feldman, a biologist at Stanford University, received one of three 2011 Dan David Prizes May 15 at Tel Aviv University.

Dan David Prizes are awarded annually for achievements having outstanding scientific, technological, cultural, or social human impacts. The awards are given in three categories -- past, present and future.

Feldman's award recognizes his work expanding human knowledge of the past through his research into human and animal evolution, as well as mathematical theory applied to evolution of behavior. He is best known for his research of cultural evolution and how genes and culture interact. A single cultural change, such as the development of agriculture, can have massive effects on the human genome, he has said.

Feldman is an SFI external professor, an SFI Science Board co-chair, and an ex-officio SFI Trustee and Science Steering Committee member.

Highlights of Feldman's research:

--  His work has led to highly focused insights of cultural significance such as the out-of-Africa model of human evolution, as well as cultural preferences in different civilizations. 

--  He originated the quantitative theory of genetic modifiers of recombination, mutation, and dispersal. His work was the first to show that the pattern of interactions among genes determined whether sex would evolve.

--  With Cavalli-Sforza, he originated the quantitative theory of cultural evolution. The application of this theory to the culture of son preference in China, and his work on the significance of male/female birth ratio in that country, seems likely to have very important social management consequences, leading to attempts by the Chinese authorities to reduce this preference.

--  He demonstrated that today's world wide pattern of genomic variation is largely due to the sequence of human migrations over the 60,000 years since modern humans left Africa. His finding that about 10 percent of genomic variation is between continents has inspired much of the subsequent discussion on the meaning of race.

--  Feldman and collaborators originated "niche construction," a generalization of evolutionary theory that stresses the feedbacks between organismic evolution and environmental dynamics, demonstrating via his model that phenotypes have a much more active role in evolution than previously thought. This has profoundly influenced subsequent work in evolutionary ecology.

More about the award:

The other 2011 Dan David Prize winners are University of California-San Francisco Professor Cynthia Kenyon and Harvard Medical School Professor Gary Ruvkun for their work on aging, and filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen for their work in cinema and society.

Past winners include former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, writers Margaret Atwood and Tom Stoppard, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, and genetics pioneer Sydney Brenner.

Ten percent of the award is donated as scholarships to doctoral and postdoctoral students doing research in the field for which the prize is given.

     Dan David Foundation announcement

     Read the Jerusalem Post article (May 15, 2011)     

     Read the Stanford University news article (March 3, 2011)

     San Francisco Chronicle article (March 6, 2011)

     Chronicle of Higher Education article (March 3, 2011)