Alan Grafen is a Scottish ethologist and

evolutionary biologist Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes such as natural selection, common descent, and speciation that produced the diversity of life on Earth. In the 1930s, the discipline of evolutionary biol ...

. He currently teaches and undertakes research at

St John's College, Oxford St John's College is a Colleges of the University of Oxford, constituent college of the University of Oxford. Founded as a men's college in 1555, it has been coeducational since 1979.Communication from Michael Riordan, college archivist Its foun ...

. Along with regular contributions to scientific journals, Grafen is known publicly for his work as co-editor (with Mark Ridley) of the 2006

festschrift In academia, a ''Festschrift'' (; plural, ''Festschriften'' ) is a book honoring a respected person, especially an academic, and presented during their lifetime. It generally takes the form of an edited volume, containing contributions from the h ...

'' Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think'', honouring the achievements of his colleague and former academic advisor. He has worked extensively in the field of biological

game theory Game theory is the study of mathematical models of strategic interactions. It has applications in many fields of social science, and is used extensively in economics, logic, systems science and computer science. Initially, game theory addressed ...

, and, in 1990, devised a model showing that Zahavi's well-known

handicap principle The handicap principle is a hypothesis proposed by the Israeli biologist Amotz Zahavi in 1975. It is meant to explain how "signal selection" during mate choice may lead to Signalling theory, "honest" or reliable signalling between male and femal ...

could theoretically exist in natural populations. He also published a seminal paper in the field of

phylogenetic comparative methods Phylogenetic comparative methods (PCMs) use information on the historical relationships of lineages (phylogenies) to test evolutionary hypotheses. The comparative method has a long history in evolutionary biology; indeed, Charles Darwin used diffe ...

, in which he demonstrated how the tools of

generalized least squares In statistics, generalized least squares (GLS) is a method used to estimate the unknown parameters in a Linear regression, linear regression model. It is used when there is a non-zero amount of correlation between the Residual (statistics), resi ...

could be applied to perform phylogenetically informed statistical analyses. Grafen was elected a

Fellow of the Royal Society Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the Fellows of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural science, natural knowledge, incl ...

in 2011.

Bibliography

References

Living people People from Dollar, Clackmannanshire Fellows of St John's College, Oxford Ethologists British evolutionary biologists Scottish biologists Fellows of the Royal Society Year of birth missing (living people) {{Scotland-biologist-stub