Reflections on papers past: Coyne and Orr 1989

Hari Sridhar, a Fellow of the Konrad Lorenz Institute, has, with others, launched a new site called Reflections on Papers Past.  Here’s the site’s aim (read more at the link):

Reflections on Papers Past is a collection of back-stories and recollections about famous scientific papers in ecology, evolution, behaviour and conservation.
The personal back-story of this project can be found here.

Allen Orr and I were honored to have one of our papers included in this pantheon (see below), which is on the site as a long interview I did with Hari a while back.

The site’s blurb and links on the front page are below:

I’d completely forgotten about my interview, as it took place over three years ago. It concerns what is probably my most-cited paper, Coyne and Orr 1989, which was called “Patterns of speciation in Drosophila“, appeared in Evolution, and can be found here (the pdf is here). It was an attempt, which met with some success, to figure out how species form in this genus of flies by looking at the reproductive barriers between pairs of species and correlating the strength of those barriers with the estimated divergence time taken from molecular differences.  (There was an update with new data in 1997.) This could give us an idea of how fast genetic barriers form between populations, and which barriers evolve fastest.

As I said, I believe this is my most-cited paper, but my most cited scientific publication is surely going to be the book Speciation, also written with my student Allen Orr, a terrific scion and great collaborator (he’s now a professor at the University of Rochester.)  I’m only guessing about citations here because I no longer check them.

At any rate, if you click below, you’ll see Hari’s interview with me. It’s long and may not be of interest to non-scientists.

A couple of pictures from yore of Allen and me.  The first one is when we enacted a mock squabble in Bellagio, Italy (2001), where we both received Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships to plan and start writing the book Speciation. But yes, there were disagreements, though not as violent as this.  The book came out in 2009 and I am prouder of it than any other piece of science I produced (I can’t speak for Allen).

Relaxing on Lake Como. Fellows stay at the Villa Serbelloni, a mansion now owned by the Rockefeller Foundation and open to tourists only for guided tours. (George Clooney’s mansion is nearby.)  The Foundation affords artists and scholars a month of freedom (and luxury) to work without interruption, save the lovely breakfasts and dinners and breaks for drinks. (You specify your lunch on a checklist filled out at breakfast, and they bring it to your door to enjoy while working or roaming the extensive and beautiful gardens.) Allen and I got a LOT done in that month. Our partners got to come to Italy, too, and we dedicated Speciation to them (they had projects to do as well.)

The Foundation also had two rowboats:

One more picture of Orr and me, taken at the Evolution meetings in Portland, Oregon in 2001. He was the outgoing President of the Society for the Study of Evolution, and I was the incoming President. This was before Portland became woke and went down the drain: