A lecture series celebrates the greatest New Zealand scientist you've never heard of.
Photo Getty Images
Allan Wilson is “the greatest New Zealand scientist you’ve never heard of”, according to Victoria University’s Professor Charles Daugherty. An evolutionary biologist raised on a Pukekohe farm, Wilson spent 35 years at the University of California in Berkeley, from where he used new biochemistry techniques to challenge our ideas of humanity and race.
The greatest scientists “change fundamentally our understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe”, says Daugherty. He puts Wilson on a par with Galileo, who “gave us an insight into our position in the universe”, Darwin, “who challenged who we are as human beings”, and Freud and Einstein, who challenged our ideas of rationality and reality.
Before Wilson, most ideas about human origins came from fossil evidence, which suggested humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor that lived somewhere between 15 and 30 million years ago. In 1967, Wilson, with his doctoral student Vince Sarich, argued that the origins of the human species could best be dated through use of a “molecular clock”.
By looking at antibody proteins in humans and chimpanzees, and assuming the proteins in each species had accumulated a steady rate of random mutations, Wilson and Sarich calculated that humans and chimpanzees had a common ancestor that lived only four to five million years ago. This figure is now widely accepted, but at the time it challenged not just interpretations of fossil evidence but also “the prejudice that we were so different from the apes”, says Daugherty.
Humans were considered to have a unique capacity for language, speech and tool use, and this was held up as evidence of fundamental and ancient differences between humans and their closest living relative, the chimpanzee. “And of course now we know that chimps use tools, we know that they’re carnivorous just like we are, and while they don’t have the vocal apparatus to speak, they can use sign language or computers to construct sentences.”
Twenty years later Wilson delivered another scientific bombshell. He and collaborator Rebecca Cann used evidence from mitochondrial DNA to calculate that all humans had a common female matrilineal ancestor – dubbed “mitochondrial Eve” – who lived in Africa only 150,000 years ago.
This theory, published in Nature in 1987, attracted a lot of scientific criticism, which Cann describes as “always personalised and often vicious” and often stemming from “an ugly undercurrent of racism”.
At this time, the widespread belief that modern humans had co-evolved on different continents, with different races having different ancient ancestors, was sometimes used as justification for the belief that there were fundamental and ancient differences between people from different races.
Wilson and Cann’s 1987 paper demolished those ideas. Says Daugherty, “Showing how closely related we are totally destroyed any scientific foundation for any belief that one group is superior to another one.”
Whether you’re aware of Wilson’s impressive legacy or not, you can expect to start hearing a lot more about him. This year is the 20th anniversary of his death, and from August 1, Cann will tour New Zealand to present a lecture – Out of Africa – about Wilson’s scientific legacy.
She will be visiting New Zealand from her home in Hawaii, where she is a professor of genetics at the University of Hawaii. The focus of her work there is trying to understand the genetic basis of language, and the conservation genetics of Hawaiian birds. “Allan has inspired all my work,” she says. “I think about him every day and miss his presence.”
Allan Wilson, photo/Getty Images
Cann’s lecture series kicks off a year-long programme at the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution, of which Daugherty is director, around the theme “From Africa to Aotearoa”. As Cann and Wilson showed in 1987, the human journey began in Africa, but “the journey ended in Aotearoa” when the first Maori people pulled up their waka here, says Daugherty. “We’re the last stop on the human journey.” The centre’s researchers, based at universities and crown research institutes around New Zealand, will spend the year looking at how and when people migrated around the Pacific and what impact that had on animals and plants. “‘From Africa to Aotearoa’ is focusing on the human migration but there are implications for all biodiversity – wherever we go, everything is affected.”
All the centre’s work draws on Wilson’s ideas, which have been endorsed by genetic evidence and are now, according to Cann, “totally mainstream”. Wilson’s work now underpins much of the fields of conservation and molecular biology and also affects primatology, forensics and even linguistics, where Wilson’s evolutionary tree-building approach has been used to track Austronesian language speakers.
So, why have more of us not heard of Allan Wilson? “No book!” exclaims Cann. “He never wrote a book, and that was by plan. He always said to me that he would only write a book when he ran out of ideas.”
Wilson never ran out of ideas; he died aged 56, of leukaemia, still in the prime of his career and only four years after his work on mitochondrial Eve was published. Now there will be a book, though about Wilson not by him. Royal Society-affiliated writer Rowan Taylor is in the final stages of a biography of Wilson that will be published next year.
OUT OF AFRICA, The Allan Wilson Legacy, by Professor Rebecca Cann, Victoria University, Wellington, Friday August 5; and Auckland University, Monday August 8. Details here.