Günter P. Wagner
Encyclopedia
Günter P. Wagner is Alison Richard Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary biology at Yale University
, and head of the Wagner Lab.
, Wagner studied zoology
and mathematical logic
at the University of Vienna
, Austria. During his graduate study, Wagner worked with the Viennese zoologist Rupert Riedl
and the theoretical chemist Peter Schuster
, and finished his PhD in theoretical population genetics
in 1979. Wagner conducted postdoctoral research at Max Planck Institutes in Göttingen
and Tübingen
, as well as at the University of Göttingen.
Wagner began his academic career as assistant professor in the Theoretical Biology Department of the University of Vienna in 1985. In 1991, he moved to Yale University as a full professor of biology and has served as the first chair of Yale's Department of Ecology and Evolution 1997-2002 and then 2005-2008.
of complex characters. His research utilizes both the theoretical tools of population genetics as well as experimental approaches in evolutionary developmental biology
. Wagner has contributed substantially to the current understanding of evolvability
of complex organisms, the origin of novel characters, and modularity.
and the evolution of dominance modifier
s. Later Wagner shifted his focus on issues of the evolution of variational properties
like canalization and modularity
. He introduced the seminal distinction between variation and variability
, the former describing the actually existing differences among individuals while the latter measures the tendency to vary, as measured in mutation rate and mutational variance. He published the first mathematical model for the evolution of genetic canalization, and thus contributed to the renaissance of studies of canalization in the mid 1990s. His more recent work is on the measurement of gene interaction, the evolution of evolvability
and how it relates to the evolution of genetic architecture.
fish. This work led to the theory that Hox cluster and genome duplications create a window of opportunity which, if coincidental with ecological changes, can lead to the fixation of these genes and novel gene functions.
In recent years the Wagner lab has focussed on the evolution of gene regulatory network
s, in particular the role of transcription factor protein evolution in evolutionary innovation.
. Wagner was an early proponent of a mechanistic understanding of homology, together with Louise Roth at Duke University
and Gerd Müller
at the University of Vienna. A test case for this approach arose when Wagner and his colleague Jacques Gauthier
proposed a solution of the century old problem of the identity of avian digits. The core of the problem is that the three digits in the bird wing have the morphology of digits 1, 2, and 3, but develop from the digit condensations 2, 3, and 4, which according to some shows that they should be digits 2, 3, and 4. Wagner and Gauthier proposed that during the evolution of theropod dinosaurs, the closest relatives of birds, digits have “changed place” so that in the bird wing digit 1 develops from position 2 and digit 2 from position 3 and digit 3 from position 4 in the wing bud. This view is now strongly supported by molecular and experimental evidence and shows how mechanistic insights can solve seemingly intractable conceptual problems.
According to Wagner the homology concept has a complementary twin, that of innovation. While homology refers to the historical continuity of character identity, the term innovation refers to the origin of novel characters, i.e. the origin of novel homologues. Therefore Wagner and Müller argue that the origin and maintenance of character identity is a central goal of evolutionary developmental biology.
in 2005. He received nominations as Gomperz Lecturer, University of California, Berkeley
1993; Koopmans Distinguished Lecturer, IIASA Vienna 1995; Sewall Wright Speaker, University of Chicago, IL, 1996. He is also a corresponding Member of Austrian Academy of Sciences
, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
.
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
, and head of the Wagner Lab.
Education and training
After undergraduate education in chemical engineeringChemical engineering
Chemical engineering is the branch of engineering that deals with physical science , and life sciences with mathematics and economics, to the process of converting raw materials or chemicals into more useful or valuable forms...
, Wagner studied zoology
Zoology
Zoology |zoölogy]]), is the branch of biology that relates to the animal kingdom, including the structure, embryology, evolution, classification, habits, and distribution of all animals, both living and extinct...
and mathematical logic
Mathematical logic
Mathematical logic is a subfield of mathematics with close connections to foundations of mathematics, theoretical computer science and philosophical logic. The field includes both the mathematical study of logic and the applications of formal logic to other areas of mathematics...
at the University of Vienna
University of Vienna
The University of Vienna is a public university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world...
, Austria. During his graduate study, Wagner worked with the Viennese zoologist Rupert Riedl
Rupert Riedl
Rupert Riedl was an Austrian zoologist who made contributions in the fields of:* Marine biology* Morphology* Theory of evolution * Evolutionary Epistemology* Environment and society...
and the theoretical chemist Peter Schuster
Peter Schuster
Peter K. Schuster is a renowned theoretical chemist, known for his work with the German Nobel Laureate Manfred Eigen in developing the quasispecies model...
, and finished his PhD in theoretical population genetics
Population genetics
Population genetics is the study of allele frequency distribution and change under the influence of the four main evolutionary processes: natural selection, genetic drift, mutation and gene flow. It also takes into account the factors of recombination, population subdivision and population...
in 1979. Wagner conducted postdoctoral research at Max Planck Institutes in Göttingen
Göttingen
Göttingen is a university town in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is the capital of the district of Göttingen. The Leine river runs through the town. In 2006 the population was 129,686.-General information:...
and Tübingen
Tübingen
Tübingen is a traditional university town in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated south of the state capital, Stuttgart, on a ridge between the Neckar and Ammer rivers.-Geography:...
, as well as at the University of Göttingen.
Wagner began his academic career as assistant professor in the Theoretical Biology Department of the University of Vienna in 1985. In 1991, he moved to Yale University as a full professor of biology and has served as the first chair of Yale's Department of Ecology and Evolution 1997-2002 and then 2005-2008.
Work
The focus of Wagner's work is on the evolutionEvolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
of complex characters. His research utilizes both the theoretical tools of population genetics as well as experimental approaches in evolutionary developmental biology
Evolutionary developmental biology
Evolutionary developmental biology is a field of biology that compares the developmental processes of different organisms to determine the ancestral relationship between them, and to discover how developmental processes evolved...
. Wagner has contributed substantially to the current understanding of evolvability
Evolvability
Evolvability is defined as the capacity of a system for adaptive evolution. Evolvability is the ability of a population of organisms to not merely generate genetic diversity, but to generate adaptive genetic diversity, and thereby evolve through natural selection.In order for a biological organism...
of complex organisms, the origin of novel characters, and modularity.
Population genetics
Wagner’s early work was focused on mathematical population genetics. Together with the mathematician Reinhard Bürger at the University of Vienna, he contributed to the theory of mutation-selection balanceMutation-selection balance
The mutation-selection balance is a classic result in population geneticsfirst derived in the 1920s by John Burdon Sanderson Haldane and R.A. Fisher.A genetic variant that is deleterious will not necessarily disappear immediately from apopulation...
and the evolution of dominance modifier
Evolution of dominance
The evolution of dominance concerns the evolution of genetic dominance. The central argument, that modifier genes act upon other genes to make them dominant or recessive, and that these are then themselves subject to natural selection was first proposed by the British population geneticist Ronald...
s. Later Wagner shifted his focus on issues of the evolution of variational properties
Variational properties
The variational properties of an organism, as distinct from its functional properties, are those properties relating principally to the production of variation among its offspring, but in a broader sense can include phenotypic plasticity...
like canalization and modularity
Modularity (biology)
Many organisms consist of modules, both anatomically and in their metabolism. Anatomical modules are usually segments or organs. When we look at illustrations of metabolic reactions, we find that they, too, are modular: we can clearly identify, for instance, the citric acid cycle as a complex...
. He introduced the seminal distinction between variation and variability
Genetic variability
Genetic variability is a measure of the tendency of individual genotypes in a population to vary from one another. Variability is different from genetic diversity, which is the amount of variation seen in a particular population. The variability of a trait describes how much that trait tends to...
, the former describing the actually existing differences among individuals while the latter measures the tendency to vary, as measured in mutation rate and mutational variance. He published the first mathematical model for the evolution of genetic canalization, and thus contributed to the renaissance of studies of canalization in the mid 1990s. His more recent work is on the measurement of gene interaction, the evolution of evolvability
Evolvability
Evolvability is defined as the capacity of a system for adaptive evolution. Evolvability is the ability of a population of organisms to not merely generate genetic diversity, but to generate adaptive genetic diversity, and thereby evolve through natural selection.In order for a biological organism...
and how it relates to the evolution of genetic architecture.
Evolutionary developmental biology
With the advent of comparative developmental genetics in the early 1991 Wagner’s research program shifted towards the molecular evolution of developmental genes, initially Hox genes and Hox gene clusters. The Wagner lab was the first to identify major blocks of ultraconserved non-coding sequences in the intergenic regions between Hox genes, and dated the “fish-specific” Hox cluster duplication to nearly coincide with the most recent common ancestor of TeleosteiTeleostei
Teleostei is one of three infraclasses in class Actinopterygii, the ray-finned fishes. This diverse group, which arose in the Triassic period, includes 20,000 extant species in about 40 orders; most living fishes are members of this group...
fish. This work led to the theory that Hox cluster and genome duplications create a window of opportunity which, if coincidental with ecological changes, can lead to the fixation of these genes and novel gene functions.
In recent years the Wagner lab has focussed on the evolution of gene regulatory network
Gene regulatory network
A gene regulatory network or genetic regulatory network is a collection of DNA segments in a cell whichinteract with each other indirectly and with other substances in the cell, thereby governing the rates at which genes in the network are transcribed into mRNA.In general, each mRNA molecule goes...
s, in particular the role of transcription factor protein evolution in evolutionary innovation.
Homology and innovation
A key conceptual and mechanistic problem in evolutionary biology is the nature of character identity, aka homologyHomology (biology)
Homology forms the basis of organization for comparative biology. In 1843, Richard Owen defined homology as "the same organ in different animals under every variety of form and function". Organs as different as a bat's wing, a seal's flipper, a cat's paw and a human hand have a common underlying...
. Wagner was an early proponent of a mechanistic understanding of homology, together with Louise Roth at Duke University
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...
and Gerd Müller
Gerd Müller (theoretical biologist)
Gerd B. Müller is professor at the University of Vienna where he heads the Department of Theoretical Biology and is speaker of the Center for Organismal Systems Biology. His research interests focus on evolutionary innovation, evo-devo theory, and the extension of the Evolutionary Synthesis...
at the University of Vienna. A test case for this approach arose when Wagner and his colleague Jacques Gauthier
Jacques Gauthier
Jacques Armand Gauthier is a vertebrate paleontologist, comparative morphologist, and systematist, and one of the founders of the use of cladistics in biology....
proposed a solution of the century old problem of the identity of avian digits. The core of the problem is that the three digits in the bird wing have the morphology of digits 1, 2, and 3, but develop from the digit condensations 2, 3, and 4, which according to some shows that they should be digits 2, 3, and 4. Wagner and Gauthier proposed that during the evolution of theropod dinosaurs, the closest relatives of birds, digits have “changed place” so that in the bird wing digit 1 develops from position 2 and digit 2 from position 3 and digit 3 from position 4 in the wing bud. This view is now strongly supported by molecular and experimental evidence and shows how mechanistic insights can solve seemingly intractable conceptual problems.
According to Wagner the homology concept has a complementary twin, that of innovation. While homology refers to the historical continuity of character identity, the term innovation refers to the origin of novel characters, i.e. the origin of novel homologues. Therefore Wagner and Müller argue that the origin and maintenance of character identity is a central goal of evolutionary developmental biology.
Awards
Günter Wagner is recipient of numerous awards, among them the prestigious MacArthur Prize in 1992, and the Humboldt PrizeHumboldt Prize
The Humboldt Prize, also known as the Humboldt Research Award, is an award given by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to internationally renowned scientists and scholars, and is currently valued at € 60,000 with the possibility of further support during the prize winner's life. Up to one...
in 2005. He received nominations as Gomperz Lecturer, University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
1993; Koopmans Distinguished Lecturer, IIASA Vienna 1995; Sewall Wright Speaker, University of Chicago, IL, 1996. He is also a corresponding Member of Austrian Academy of Sciences
Austrian Academy of Sciences
The Austrian Academy of Sciences is a legal entity under the special protection of the Federal Republic of Austria. According to the statutes of the Academy its mission is to promote the sciences and humanities in every respect and in every field, particularly in fundamental research...
, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
American Association for the Advancement of Science
The American Association for the Advancement of Science is an international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsibility, and supporting scientific education and science outreach for the...
, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
.
External links
- http://pantheon.yale.edu/~gpwagner/index.html
- http://www.oeaw.ac.at/english/home.html
- http://www.aaas.org/