Darwin's Reach

Norman A. Johnson, Ph.D., is an evolutionary geneticist, who received his B.S. from William and Mary (1987) and a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester (1992). His doctoral thesis was on the genetics of hybrid sterility between different species of Drosophila. He was a postdoctoral fellow with Michael Wade on quantitative genetics of hybrid traits between species of Tribolium flour beetles at the University of Chicago. Johnson teaches classes in genetics and/or evolution. Most of his research has been on the genetics and evolution of why hybrids between species are often sterile or inviable. Other research interests include the evolution of sex chromosomes, the evolution of extremely large dietary niches in insects, and the interplay between the relaxation of selection and the loss of traits. He wrote Darwinian Detectives: Revealing the Natural History of Genes and Genomes, published in 2007. Johnson was the lead organizer for a working group at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (in Durham, NC) on Communicating the Relevance of Human Evolution. One of the outcomes was a paper for The American Biology Teacher journal that addresses the question, "if humans evolved from chimps, why are there still chimps?" Johnson was the section editor for the Applied Evolution section of the Encyclopedia of Evolution. He wrote three of the entries (overview of evolutionary medicine and cancer, pest management, and evolution and breeding) and commissioned a dozen other entries in subjects ranging from evolution and climate change response to evolutionary computation to evolution and national security.