Jody Hey is an

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 ...

Temple University Temple University (Temple or TU) is a public university, public Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related research university in Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. It was founded in 1884 by the Baptist ministe ...

. In the 1980s and 1990s he did research on natural selection and species divergence in fruit flies (

Drosophila ''Drosophila'' (), from Ancient Greek δρόσος (''drósos''), meaning "dew", and φίλος (''phílos''), meaning "loving", is a genus of fly, belonging to the family Drosophilidae, whose members are often called "small fruit flies" or p ...

). More recently he has worked on the development of methods for studying evolutionary divergence, on the divergence of cichlid fishes from

Lake Malawi Lake Malawi, also known as Lake Nyasa in Tanzania and Lago Niassa in Mozambique, () is an African Great Lakes, African Great Lake and the southernmost lake in the East African Rift system, located between Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania. It is ...

, on

chimpanzee The chimpanzee (; ''Pan troglodytes''), also simply known as the chimp, is a species of Hominidae, great ape native to the forests and savannahs of tropical Africa. It has four confirmed subspecies and a fifth proposed one. When its close rel ...

s and on human populations. His research on divergence and speciation also lead him to study the difficulties of identifying species. Hey has also conducted mathematical and statistical research in population genetics. He is the author of several computer programs that are used by other biologists for questions in

population genetics Population genetics is a subfield of genetics that deals with genetic differences within and among populations, and is a part of evolutionary biology. Studies in this branch of biology examine such phenomena as Adaptation (biology), adaptation, s ...

. In 2004 Hey and Rasmus Nielsen produced the computer program IM, which implements a method for fitting an isolation-with-migration model to a pair of closely related populations or species. They updated this method with a new program in 2007 called IMa. For many years Hey was at

Rutgers University Rutgers University ( ), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of three campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's C ...

. He moved to

in 2013. He is currently the Director of the Center for Computational Genetics and Genomics at Temple. In 1998 Hey received a Guggenheim fellowship. In 2008 Hey was elected to the presidency of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. In 2018 Hey was elected as a AAAS Fellow.

Hey on the species problem

Although a geneticist and evolutionary biologist, Hey has also published on philosophical and historical aspects of the

species problem A species () is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction. It is the basic unit of Taxonomy (biology), ...

. He has argued that the difficulties of defining species cannot be addressed without also appreciating people's motivations and tendencies with regard to categorization. Hey has also questioned the development of, and debate over, multiple species concepts that were inspired by

Ernst Mayr Ernst Walter Mayr ( ; ; 5 July 1904 – 3 February 2005) was a German-American evolutionary biologist. He was also a renowned Taxonomy (biology), taxonomist, tropical explorer, ornithologist, Philosophy of biology, philosopher of biology, and ...

. More recently Hey examined the confusion between Mayr's idea of "Population thinking" and the biological concept of a population.Hey, J. 2011. Regarding the Confusion between the Population Concept and Mayr's “Population Thinking”. The Quarterly Review of Biology 86:253-264.

Links to online articles

Why Should We Care about Species?
Scitable by Nature Education
Journal Articles

Books

''Genes Categories and Species''
Oxford 2001
''Systematics and the Origin of Species: On Ernst Mayr's 100th Anniversary''
National Academies Press 2005

External links

Jody Hey's website

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hey, Jody Living people Population geneticists Year of birth missing (living people)