Walter M. Fitch
Encyclopedia
Walter M. Fitch. Until his death he was professor
Professor
A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...

 of molecular evolution
Molecular evolution
Molecular evolution is in part a process of evolution at the scale of DNA, RNA, and proteins. Molecular evolution emerged as a scientific field in the 1960s as researchers from molecular biology, evolutionary biology and population genetics sought to understand recent discoveries on the structure...

 at the University of California, Irvine
University of California, Irvine
The University of California, Irvine , founded in 1965, is one of the ten campuses of the University of California, located in Irvine, California, USA...

. He was also a member of the National Academy of Sciences
United States National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...

, the American Philosophical Society
American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743, and located in Philadelphia, Pa., is an eminent scholarly organization of international reputation, that promotes useful knowledge in the sciences and humanities through excellence in scholarly research, professional meetings, publications,...

, and 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 was a Foreign Member of the Linnean Society (London)
Linnean Society of London
The Linnean Society of London is the world's premier society for the study and dissemination of taxonomy and natural history. It publishes a zoological journal, as well as botanical and biological journals...

. He is the co-founder of the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, together with Masatoshi Nei
Masatoshi Nei
is Evan Pugh Professor of Biology at Pennsylvania State University and Director of the since 1990. He was born in 1931 in Miyazaki Prefecture, on Kyūshū Island, Japan...

, and was the first president of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.

Walter Fitch is noted for his pioneering work on reconstruction of phylogenies
Phylogenetic tree
A phylogenetic tree or evolutionary tree is a branching diagram or "tree" showing the inferred evolutionary relationships among various biological species or other entities based upon similarities and differences in their physical and/or genetic characteristics...

 (evolutionary trees) from protein and DNA sequences. Among his achievements are the first major paper on distance matrix
Distance matrix
In mathematics, computer science and graph theory, a distance matrix is a matrix containing the distances, taken pairwise, of a set of points...

 methods, which introduced the Fitch-Margoliash method which seeks the tree that best predicts a set of pairwise distances among species. He also developed the Fitch parsimony algorithm, which evaluates rapidly and exactly the minimum number of changes of state of a sequence on a given phylogeny. His definition of orthologous sequences has been very often cited and used as a reference in many research publications.

Major papers

  • Fitch, W. M. and E. Margoliash. (1967). Construction of phylogenetic trees. Science 155: 279-284.
  • Fitch, W. M. (1970). Distinguishing homologous from analogous proteins. Systematic Biology 19 (2): 99-113.
  • Fitch, W. M. (1971). Toward defining the course of evolution: minimum change for a specified tree topology. Systematic Zoology 20 (4): 406-416

External links

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