Alan Grafen | |
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Born | |
Nationality | Scottish |
Citizenship | United Kingdom |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Ethology, Evolutionary biology |
Institutions | University of Oxford |
Thesis | The economics of evolutionary stability (1984) |
Doctoral advisor | Richard Dawkins |
Doctoral students | |
Website |
users |
Alan Grafen FRS is a Scottish ethologist and evolutionary biologist. He currently teaches and undertakes research at St John's College, Oxford. [1] Along with regular contributions to scientific journals, Grafen is known publicly for his work as co-editor (with Mark Ridley) of the 2006 festschrift Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think, [2] honouring the achievements of his colleague and former academic advisor. He has worked extensively in the field of biological game theory, and, in 1990, devised a model showing that Zahavi's well-known handicap principle could theoretically exist in natural populations. [3] [4]
He also published a seminal paper in the field of phylogenetic comparative methods, in which he demonstrated how the tools of generalized least squares could be applied to perform phylogenetically informed statistical analyses. [5]
Grafen was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2011. [6]