- Walter M. Fitch
Walter M. Fitch is
professor ofmolecular evolution at theUniversity of California, Irvine . He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, theAmerican Philosophical Society , and theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science , and is a Foreign Member of the Linnean Society (London). He is the co-founder of the journal "Molecular Biology and Evolution", together withMasatoshi Nei , and was the first president of theSociety for Molecular Biology and Evolution .Walter Fitch is noted for his pioneering work on reconstruction of phylogenies (evolutionary trees) from protein and DNA sequences. Among his achievements are the first major paper on
distance matrix methods, which introduced the Fitch-Margoliash method which seeks the tree that best predicts a set of pairwise distances among species. He also developed the Fitchparsimony algorithm, which evaluates rapidly and exactly the minimum number of changes of state of a sequence on a given phylogeny.Major papers
* Fitch, W. M. and E. Margoliash. (1967). Construction of phylogenetic trees. "Science" 155: 279-284.
* Fitch, W. M. (1971). Toward defining the course of evolution: minimum change for a specified tree topology. "Systematic Zoology" 20: 406-416Dr. Fitch currently teaches a course in Creationism at the University of California, Irvine.
External links
* [http://ecoevo.bio.uci.edu/Faculty/Fitch/Fitch.html Faculty page] - with online publications
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