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W. Ford Doolittle is a biochemist. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He is also the winner of the 2014 Herzberg Medal of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
Doolittle has made significant contributions to the study of cyanobacteria. He found evidence for the endosymbiont origins of chloroplasts, and developed a theoretical basis for the initial evolution of eukaryotes. He has shown the importance of horizontal gene transfer in prokaryotic evolution.
As of 2005, he is a professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He received his BA in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard University in 1963 and his PhD from Stanford University in 1967.
In 1981, Doolittle received some level of notoriety for his article in The CoEvolution Quarterly entitled "Is Nature Really Motherly?". This was a sharp rebuttal of J. E. Lovelock's formulation of the Gaia Theory. Doolittle's article is often cited by Lovelock's critics.
Because of his philosophical musings on the non-existence of an all-encompassing Tree of Life, Doolittle has occasionally been cited on Intelligent Design blogs. However, though Doolittle argues that a bifurcating tree is not an adequate metaphor for the evolution of life on earth, he is not a supporter of Intelligent Design. A single common ancestor and tree relating all of life on earth is not a necessary component of the theory of descent with modification, the essence of evolution.
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