I'm a theoretical evolutionary biologist, interested primarily in how different kinds of adaptation arise through natural selection. In my most recent work, I have shown how genetic kin recognition can evolve from scratch, in effect resolving the longstanding “Crozier’s paradox”, which states that genetic kin recognition should be unstable. Before that, I showed how the “parliament of genes” stops selfish genetic elements from distorting organismal adaptations. Much of my current research is on the broad topic of whether cooperation can be facilitated by unusual genetic architectures, like the cooperation gene being physically linked to a recognisable tag (“greenbeard”), or the cooperation gene being encoded on a transferrable plasmid.
WATCH now: Genetic conflict & the Parliament of genes!
