The two best-cited pieces of scientific work bearing my name were both done in collaboration with my graduate student, Allen Orr, who was recommended to me by Bruce Grant, my undergrad genetics teacher at The College of William and Mary. Allen had gotten a B.A. in philosophy there, and went on to do a master’s degree with Bruce in Drosophila genetics. Bruce recommended him to me as a good prospect, but wasn’t sure how he’d work out as a Ph.D. student.
At the time I was at the University of Maryland, took Allen on, and the rest was history. I had no idea how to mentor graduate students—Allen was my first—but it turned out he needed no mentoring: he was a self-starter. Over his few years in my lab, he published about ten papers and won the Society for the Study of Evolution’s Dobzhansky Prize in 1993, given to the person the SSE’s committee considers the best young evolutionary biologist.
The two most cited works include a pair of related papers (Coyne and Orr 1989, 1997), and our coauthored book Speciation (2004).
I summarized the main findings of the two papers, and gave a bit of their history, in a post from October of last year, which includes an interview I did about it in 2017 for Reflections of Paper Past. At that time I didn’t know that two people, including my last student, Daniel Matute, were writing a retrospective of the 1989 and 1997 papers.
At any rate, in honor of the 75th anniversary of the journal Evolution, it’s been publishing retrospectives of notable papers that have appeared there. One chosen for this treatment was the Coyne and Orr duo. The retrospective paper, by Daniel Matute (UNC Chapel Hill) and Brandon S. Cooper, now at the University of Montana, can be accessed by clicking on the screenshot below, or you can get the pdf here. The reference to the retrospective is at the bottom. It will probably be of interest only to evolutionary geneticists, but it’s here for the record.
I have to say that Daniel and Brandon did a terrific job. It’s far more than a “retrospective” of our papers, but a new meta-analysis of existing data on how reproductive barriers between incipient species grow with time. (That was the subject of our original papers, and you can read the summary at the link above.) The new paper highlights where we were right, where we were wrong, what gaps there are in our knowledge about reproductive isolation, and what directions future research on the time course of speciation should take. In other words, it’s a review paper on a growing area of research rather than a discussion of just two small papers.
I’ll end by giving their abstract, which shows what the paper is about. But if you work on speciation, you’ll want to read their whole paper:
Abstract
Understanding the processes of population divergence and speciation remains a core question in evolutionary biology. For nearly a hundred years evolutionary geneticists have characterized reproductive isolation (RI) mechanisms and specific barriers to gene flow required for species formation. The seminal work of Coyne and Orr provided the first comprehensive comparative analysis of speciation. By combining phylogenetic hypotheses and species range data with estimates of genetic divergence and multiple mechanisms of RI across Drosophila, Coyne and Orr’s influential meta‐analyses answered fundamental questions and motivated new analyses that continue to push the field forward today. Now 30 years later, we revisit the five questions addressed by Coyne and Orr, identifying results that remain well supported and others that seem less robust with new data. We then consider the future of speciation research, with emphasis on areas where novel methods and data motivate potential progress. While the literature remains biased towards Drosophila and other model systems, we are enthusiastic about the future of the field.
____________________
Matute, D.R. and Cooper, B.S. (2021), Comparative studies on speciation: 30 years since Coyne and Orr. Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.14181
Congratulations on having your papers chosen for this review!
This is indeed a well done retrospective! I am reading it as time allows.
Sub
I read the article, but it is way above my pay grade, I think I’m a but wiser now, but I’m not really sure.
I’m pretty sure that not being really sure is part of being a bit wiser.
Does that make the “retrospective” your grandchild paper? 🙂
I often read without comprehending, sometimes multiple readings help, sometimes not; I had a hard time with this one, but the abstract helped. I did wonder about the last sentence of the abstract: While the literature remains biased towards Drosophila and other model systems, we are enthusiastic about the future of the field. Does this mean they’re studying a new genus, other than Drosophila? Or what is this model system they’re enthusiastic about changing (don’t know if “changing” is the proper word).
They are applying the methods we used in flies to other organisms (and in fact several such studies are cited in the Matute and Cooper paper, including in fish and plants. The future lies with DNA sequencing as an index of evolutionary time passed (the DNA divergence between a pair of species is a measure of how long ago they had a common ancestor), not with gel electrophoresis, which is the index we used and is now outmoded. The problem, however, is getting the data on reproductive isolation, which is easy in the lab with Drosophila but virtually impossible in many other groups.
Thanks for the clarification. I can imagine the difficulties studying the DNA of fish and even plants in a lab setting- especially considering some of the immense and advanced Drosophila breeding sites you’ve written about. How to do that with other groups? Got me.
I do not understand those who think that knowledge is static. to cease to learn is to die. mazeltov (sp)
Wow, very cool!