Günter P. Wagner (born May 28, 1954 in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...

) is an Austrian-born evolutionary biologist who is Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary biology at

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...

, and head of the Wagner Lab.

Education and training

After undergraduate education in

chemical engineering Chemical engineering is an engineering field which deals with the study of operation and design of chemical plants as well as methods of improving production. Chemical engineers develop economical commercial processes to convert raw materials in ...

, Wagner studied

zoology Zoology ()The pronunciation of zoology as is usually regarded as nonstandard, though it is not uncommon. is the branch of biology that studies the animal kingdom, including the structure, embryology, evolution, classification, habits, and ...

and

mathematical logic Mathematical logic is the study of formal logic within mathematics. Major subareas include model theory, proof theory, set theory, and recursion theory. Research in mathematical logic commonly addresses the mathematical properties of formal ...

at the

University of Vienna The University of Vienna (german: Universität Wien) is a public research university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world. With its long and rich h ...

, Austria. During his graduate study, Wagner worked with the Viennese zoologist

Rupert Riedl Rupert Riedl (22 February 1925 – 18 September 2005) was an Austrian zoologist. Biography Riedl was a scientist with broad interests, whose influence in epistemology grounded in evolutionary theory was notable, although less in English-speakin ...

and the theoretical chemist Peter Schuster, and finished his PhD in theoretical

population genetics Population genetics is a subfield of genetics that deals with genetic differences within and between populations, and is a part of evolutionary biology. Studies in this branch of biology examine such phenomena as adaptation, speciation, and pop ...

in 1979. Wagner conducted postdoctoral research at

Max Planck Institute Max or MAX may refer to: Animals * Max (dog) (1983–2013), at one time purported to be the world's oldest living dog * Max (English Springer Spaniel), the first pet dog to win the PDSA Order of Merit (animal equivalent of OBE) * Max (gorilla) ...

s in

Göttingen Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a college town, university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the Capital (political), capital of Göttingen (district), the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, t ...

and

Tübingen Tübingen (, , Swabian: ''Dibenga'') is a traditional university city in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated south of the state capital, Stuttgart, and developed on both sides of the Neckar and Ammer rivers. about one in thre ...

, as well as at the

University of Göttingen The University of Göttingen, officially the Georg August University of Göttingen, (german: Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, known informally as Georgia Augusta) is a public research university in the city of Göttingen, Germany. Founded i ...

. Wagner began his academic career as assistant professor in the Theoretical Biology Department of the University of Vienna in 1985. In 1991, he moved to Yale University as a full professor of biology and has served as the first chair of Yale's Department of Ecology and Evolution from 1997 2002 and then from 2005 to 2008.

Work

The focus of Wagner's work is on the

evolution Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation ...

of complex characters. His research utilizes both the theoretical tools of population genetics as well as experimental approaches in

evolutionary developmental biology Evolutionary developmental biology (informally, evo-devo) is a field of biological research that compares the developmental processes of different organisms to infer how developmental processes evolved. The field grew from 19th-century beginn ...

. Wagner has contributed substantially to the current understanding of

evolvability Evolvability is defined as the capacity of a system for adaptive evolution. Evolvability is the ability of a population of organisms to not merely generate genetic diversity, but to generate '' adaptive'' genetic diversity, and thereby evolve thr ...

of complex organisms, the origin of novel characters, and modularity.

Population genetics

Wagner's early work was focused on mathematical population genetics. Together with the mathematician Reinhard Bürger at the University of Vienna, he contributed to the theory of mutation–selection balance and the evolution of dominance modifiers. Later Wagner shifted his focus on issues of the evolution of variational properties like canalization and

modularity Broadly speaking, modularity is the degree to which a system's components may be separated and recombined, often with the benefit of flexibility and variety in use. The concept of modularity is used primarily to reduce complexity by breaking a s ...

. He introduced the seminal distinction between

variation Variation or Variations may refer to: Science and mathematics * Variation (astronomy), any perturbation of the mean motion or orbit of a planet or satellite, particularly of the moon * Genetic variation, the difference in DNA among individual ...

and variability, the former describing the actually existing differences among individuals while the latter measures the tendency to vary, as measured in mutation rate and mutational variance. He published the first mathematical model for the evolution of genetic canalization, and thus contributed to the renaissance of studies of canalization in the mid 1990s. His more recent work is on the measurement of gene interaction, the evolution of

and how it relates to the evolution of genetic architecture.

Evolutionary developmental biology

With the advent of comparative developmental genetics in the early 1991 Wagner's research program shifted towards the

molecular evolution Molecular evolution is the process of change in the sequence composition of cell (biology), cellular molecules such as DNA, RNA, and proteins across generations. The field of molecular evolution uses principles of evolutionary biology and popula ...

of developmental genes, initially Hox genes and Hox gene clusters. The Wagner lab was the first to identify major blocks of ultraconserved non-coding sequences in the intergenic regions between Hox genes, and dated the “fish-specific” Hox cluster duplication to nearly coincide with the most recent common ancestor of

Teleostei Teleostei (; Greek ''teleios'' "complete" + ''osteon'' "bone"), members of which are known as teleosts ), is, by far, the largest infraclass in the class Actinopterygii, the ray-finned fishes, containing 96% of all extant species of fish. Tele ...

fish. This work led to the theory that Hox cluster and genome duplications create a window of opportunity which, if coincidental with ecological changes, can lead to the fixation of these genes and novel gene functions. In recent years the Wagner lab has focussed on the evolution of

gene regulatory network A gene (or genetic) regulatory network (GRN) is a collection of molecular regulators that interact with each other and with other substances in the cell to govern the gene expression levels of mRNA and proteins which, in turn, determine the fun ...

s, in particular the role of transcription factor protein evolution in evolutionary innovation. In August 2016, an article by Wagner and Mihaela Pavlicev, gained attention for proposing a possible evolutionary connection between the female orgasm in humans and ovulation induced by copulation in other mammals.

Homology and innovation

A key conceptual and mechanistic problem in evolutionary biology is the nature of character identity, aka homology. Wagner was an early proponent of a mechanistic understanding of homology, together with Louise Roth at Duke University and

Gerd Müller Gerhard "Gerd" Müller (; 3 November 1945 – 15 August 2021) was a German professional footballer. A striker renowned for his clinical finishing, especially in and around the six-yard box, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest goalscor ...

at the University of Vienna. A test case for this approach arose when Wagner and his colleague

Jacques Gauthier Jacques Armand Gauthier (born June 7, 1948 in New York City) is an American vertebrate paleontologist, comparative morphologist, and systematist, and one of the founders of the use of cladistics in biology. Life and career Gauthier is the s ...

proposed a solution of the century-old problem of the identity of avian digits. The core of the problem is that the three digits in the bird wing have the morphology of digits 1, 2, and 3, but develop from the digit condensations 2, 3, and 4, which according to some shows that they should be digits 2, 3, and 4. Wagner and Gauthier proposed that during the evolution of

theropod Theropoda (; ), whose members are known as theropods, is a dinosaur clade that is characterized by hollow bones and three toes and claws on each limb. Theropods are generally classed as a group of saurischian dinosaurs. They were ancestrally ...

dinosaurs, the closest relatives of birds, digits have "changed place" so that in the bird wing digit 1 develops from position 2 and digit 2 from position 3 and digit 3 from position 4 in the wing bud. This view is now strongly supported by molecular and experimental evidence and shows how mechanistic insights can solve seemingly intractable conceptual problems. According to Wagner the homology concept has a complementary twin, that of innovation. While homology refers to the historical continuity of character identity, the term innovation refers to the origin of novel characters, i.e. the origin of novel homologues. Therefore, Wagner and Müller argue that the origin and maintenance of character identity is a central goal of evolutionary developmental biology.

Awards

Günter Wagner is recipient of numerous awards, among them the prestigious

MacArthur Prize The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to between 20 and 30 ind ...

in 1992, the

Bobby Murcer Bobby Ray Murcer (May 20, 1946 – July 12, 2008) was an American professional baseball outfielder who played 17 seasons in Major League Baseball between 1965 and 1983. He played the majority of his career for the New York Yankees, whom he later ...

Prize in 2001, and the

Humboldt Prize The Humboldt Prize, the Humboldt-Forschungspreis in German, also known as the Humboldt Research Award, is an award given by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany to internationally renowned scientists and scholars who work outside of G ...

in 2007. He received nominations as Gomperz Lecturer,

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

1993; Koopmans Distinguished Lecturer, IIASA Vienna 1995; Sewall Wright Speaker, University of Chicago, IL, 1996. He is also a corresponding Member of Austrian Academy of Sciences (1997), a Fellow of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsi ...

(1997), and a Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, ...

(2010). He was elected to the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nat ...

in 2018.

Publications

Wagner has published four books, numerous book chapters and more than 270 scientific articles. Books * ''The Character Concept in Evolutionary Biology'', Academic Press. 2000 * ''Modularity in Development and Evolution'', University of Chicago Press, 2004 * ''Morphology and the Evolution of Development'', Yale University Press. 2007 * ''Homology, Genes, and Evolutionary Innovation''. Princeton University Press. 2014 Articles
ResearchGate Publication list

References

External links

Yale University Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wagner, Gunter 1954 births Living people Austrian biologists Evolutionary biologists Extended evolutionary synthesis Scientists from Vienna University of Vienna alumni University of Göttingen alumni Academic staff of the University of Vienna Yale University faculty MacArthur Fellows Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science New England Complex Systems Institute