Ford Doolittle

W. Ford Doolittle  (born February 21, 1941 in Urbana, Illinois) is Professor Emeritus at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.  

Doolittle is an evolutionary and molecular biologist. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and other awards.

Doolittle studied cyanobacteria. He found evidence for the endosymbiont origins of chloroplasts. He has a theory for the initial evolution of eukaryotes. He has shown why horizontal gene transfer is important to prokaryotic evolution.

In 1981, Doolittle received notice for his article in The CoEvolution Quarterly entitled "Is Nature Really Motherly?".  This was a criticism of J. E. Lovelock's formulation of the Gaia Theory. Doolittle's article is often cited by Lovelock's critics.

Doolittle thinks the idea of an all-encompassing Tree of Life is wrong. However, he is not a supporter of intelligent design. A single common ancestor and tree of all of life on Earth is not the only way  evolution could have happened.

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Category:1941 births
Category:Living people
Category:Harvard University alumni
Category:American biologists
Category:American biochemists
Category:Scientists from Urbana, Illinois