Jack Lester King (March 9, 1934 – June 29, 1983) was an American evolutionary biologist best known for co-authoring (with

Thomas H. Jukes Thomas Hughes Jukes (August 26, 1906 – November 1, 1999) was a British-born American biologist known for his work in nutrition, molecular evolution, and for his public engagement with controversial scientific issues, including DDT, vitamin ...

) a seminal paper on the

neutral theory of molecular evolution The neutral theory of molecular evolution holds that most evolutionary changes occur at the molecular level, and most of the variation within and between species are due to random genetic drift of mutant alleles that are selectively neutral. The ...

, "

Non-Darwinian Evolution Alternatives to Darwinian evolution have been proposed by scholars investigating biology to explain signs of evolution and the relatedness of different groups of living things. The alternatives in question do not deny that evolutionary changes ove ...

". King was born in

Oakland, California Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast of the United States, West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third ...

and received both undergraduate and doctoral training at the

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 ...

, earning a Ph.D. in Zoology in 1963. From 1963 to 1969, he remained at UC Berkeley as a postdoctoral fellow in

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 (biology), adaptation, ...

, then independent researcher in

biophysics Biophysics is an interdisciplinary science that applies approaches and methods traditionally used in physics to study biological phenomena. Biophysics covers all scales of biological organization, from molecular to organismic and populations. ...

, at the Donner Laboratory. In 1969, King became a professor at

University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduates and 2,983 graduate students enrolled in 2021–2022. It is part of the U ...

."Jack Lester King 1934–1983 Associate Editor of the ''Journal of Molecular Evolution'' October 1971–June 1983", in ''Journal of Molecular Evolution'', Vol. 19, No. 5 (1983), pp. 307-308 King and Jukes' "Non-Darwinian Evolution", published in ''Science'' in 1969 shortly after

Motoo Kimura (November 13, 1924 – November 13, 1994) was a Japanese biologist best known for introducing the neutral theory of molecular evolution in 1968. He became one of the most influential theoretical population geneticists. He is remembered in genet ...

first mooted the neutral theory, brought together a variety of experimental evidence and theoretical arguments in support of the idea that the vast majority of mutations, at the molecular level, are neither beneficial nor harmful. As the intentionally provocative title implies, King and Jukes suggested that for most

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

genetic drift Genetic drift, also known as allelic drift or the Wright effect, is the change in the frequency of an existing gene variant (allele) in a population due to random chance. Genetic drift may cause gene variants to disappear completely and there ...

rather than

natural selection Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in the heritable traits characteristic of a population over generations. Cha ...

is the main factor. King himself was "a staunch but progressive Darwinian", but he enjoyed the strong reactions the paper provoked. This marked the beginning of the controversy over neutral evolution and the "neutralist-selectionist debate", primarily between organismal and molecular biologists, which would continue throughout King's career. His later work in this area focused on neutral substitutions, isoalleles, and the measurement of variation through electrophoresis.Jack Lester King, Biological Sciences: Santa Barbara
''1985, University of California: In Memoriam'', pp. 217-219, accessed May 13, 2007 King became an associate editor of the ''

Journal of Molecular Evolution The ''Journal of Molecular Evolution'' is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal that covers molecular evolution. It is published by Springer Science+Business Media and was established in 1971. The founding editor was Emile Zuckerkandl, who re ...

'' in 1971, shortly after the journal's founding. He co-authored a 1981 textbook, ''Biology, The Science of Life''. King died unexpectedly in 1983 from a brain hemorrhage caused by acute myelomonocytic leukemia. King was survived by his second wife Ethel and their two children, as well as six children from his first marriage.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:King, Jack Lester American geneticists Evolutionary biologists 1983 deaths 1934 births Neutral theory