Laureation address: Professor Marcus Feldman

Honorary Degree of Doctor of Science
Laureation by Professor Kevin Laland FRSE, School of Biology

Wednesday 22 June 2022

Vice-Chancellor, it is my privilege to present for the degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa, Professor Marcus Feldman. 

Marcus Feldman is the Burnet C and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor of Biological
Sciences at Stanford University, where he is also founder and director of the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies, and co-director of the Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics. 

Now a naturalised American, Feldman was born in Perth, Australia in 1942 and, after completing a degree and a Masters in Mathematics and Statistics, moved to Stanford, California in the 1960s to carry out his PhD, where he has been ever since. Rising to full Professor in 1977, Feldman is now recognised as one of the world’s leading theoretical biologists, renowned for his contributions to mathematical evolutionary theory. 

Feldman is the author of 15 books and some 700 scientific papers on evolution, ecology, mathematical biology and demography, including over 70 articles in Nature, Science and in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). He has won over 30 major honours, including being an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the Kimura Motoo award in human evolution, and the Society for the Study of Evolution’s Lifetime Achievement Award. 

He has made profound contributions to many areas of biology, including human genetics, the evolution of sex, recombination and epistasis, niche construction theory and cultural evolution. His work has been cited 75,000 times, which makes Feldman one of the most influential biologists on the planet. He has founded and been managing editor of leading biological journals and played a key role in the establishment of the Santa Fe Institute, the world’s leading research centre for complexity science. 

Feldman is not only a visionary scientist but a dedicated teacher who has also won awards for his service and mentorship. One of his most pleasing legacies is that his PhD students and postdoctoral students populate the Biology faculties of universities around the world. Feldman is also a scientist with a well-developed social conscience. He has taken a courageous stance in debunking bogus claims linking race with intelligence and with other abilities and conditions, conducting the important genetic analyses that invalidate a biological concept of race applied to humans, and speaking out against scientific racism. 

However, it is his contributions to the field of cultural evolution that has been particularly important to researchers at the University of St Andrews. From the early 1970s, Feldman, together with Luca Cavalli-Sforza, began modelling cultural inheritance, cultural change over time, and the coevolutionary interactions between genes and culture. Their classic monograph Cultural Transmission and Evolution published in 1981 has been cited well over 5,000 times alone. It is difficult to overstate the importance of these works, in which much of the formal machinery for the mathematical modelling of culture and gene-culture coevolution is introduced. This body of theory has been used in a variety of ways, including partitioning the variance in behavioural and personality traits, addressing questions about the adaptive advantages of complex forms of phenotypic plasticity, and investigating the evolution of particular traits, ranging from language learning to conformity. 

Almost 50 years later, cultural evolution has blossomed into a major interdisciplinary field, with its own international society formed in 2017, and an annual conference. As one of the world’s leading centres of excellence for research into cultural evolution, the members of the Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution at St Andrews, which includes 23 staff collaborating across the Schools of Psychology and Neuroscience and Biology, particularly appreciate Feldman’s foundational contribution. Many researchers at St Andrews regularly use concepts, methods, and modelling techniques devised by Feldman in their work. The University of St Andrews’ international prominence in this field owes a debt to Feldman’s colossal contribution, and it is fitting that this should be recognised with an honorary degree. 

Vice-Chancellor, in recognition of his major contribution to biology and in particular to the development of the field of cultural evolution, I invite you to confer the degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa, on Professor Marcus Feldman.