Jaroslav Flegr
Encyclopedia
Jaroslav Flegr is a professor of biology
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...

 at Charles University in Prague
Charles University in Prague
Charles University in Prague is the oldest and largest university in the Czech Republic. Founded in 1348, it was the first university in Central Europe and is also considered the earliest German university...

. He is a parasitologist
Parasitology
Parasitology is the study of parasites, their hosts, and the relationship between them. As a biological discipline, the scope of parasitology is not determined by the organism or environment in question, but by their way of life...

, evolutionary biologist
Evolution
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...

, the author of the book Frozen Evolution and member of the editorial board of Neuroendocrinology Letters.

His work on the influence of toxoplasmosis
Toxoplasmosis
Toxoplasmosis is a parasitic disease caused by the protozoan Toxoplasma gondii. The parasite infects most genera of warm-blooded animals, including humans, but the primary host is the felid family. Animals are infected by eating infected meat, by ingestion of feces of a cat that has itself...

 infection on personality
Personality type
Personality type refers to the psychological classification of different types of individuals. Personality types are sometimes distinguished from personality traits, with the latter embodying a smaller grouping of behavioral tendencies. Types are sometimes said to involve qualitative differences...

, sex ratio
Sex ratio
Sex ratio is the ratio of males to females in a population. The primary sex ratio is the ratio at the time of conception, secondary sex ratio is the ratio at time of birth, and tertiary sex ratio is the ratio of mature organisms....

s, and the risks of road accidents, has received substantial media attention, with the work on road accidents being particularly prominent, as Flegr has claimed that the infection might increase the number of accidents by as much as one million crashes per year.

His book Frozen Evolution deals with the idea of frozen plasticity, a hypothesis that describes a new mechanism for the origin of adaptive traits. He claims that natural selection
Natural selection
Natural selection is the nonrandom process by which biologic traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of differential reproduction of their bearers. It is a key mechanism of evolution....

 can only explain the evolution of such adaptation
Adaptation
An adaptation in biology is a trait with a current functional role in the life history of an organism that is maintained and evolved by means of natural selection. An adaptation refers to both the current state of being adapted and to the dynamic evolutionary process that leads to the adaptation....

s under very special situation, e.g. in genetically homogeneous population of asexual organisms. He describes the idea of "frozen plasticity" as being more general, and contends that it can better explain the origin and evolution of adaptive traits in genetically heterogeneous population of sexual organisms.http://www.frozenevolution.com/
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