Geoff Parker


Education

Parker attended Lymm Grammar School in Lymm, Cheshire, and gained his BSc from the University of Bristol in 1965, from where he also gained a doctorate in 1969 under H.E. Hinton, FRS. His PhD was on The reproductive behaviour and the nature of sexual selection in Scathophaga stercoraria L. , and provided a detailed quantitative test of Darwin's theory of sexual selection, and an early application of optimality theory in biology.

Career and research

Parker moved to the University of Liverpool in 1968, where he became a lecturer in zoology. In 1978-79, he spent a year as a senior research fellow in the Research Centre at King's College, Cambridge. After returning to Liverpool he became a professor in 1989 following his election to the Royal Society. In 1996 he became the Derby Chair of Zoology at the University of Liverpool, retiring in 2009, but remaining as emeritus professor.
His main research interests have been in behavioural ecology and evolutionary biology. He is noted for introducing the concept of sperm competition and its evolutionary consequences in 1970 in a review on insect mating systems. This work pioneered the development of the field of postcopulatory sexual selection, the study of sexually selected adaptations arising from competition between the ejaculates of different mates.
Much of his work from the 1970s onwards has related to the application of game theory to various biological problems, using the evolutionarily stable strategy approach pioneered by John Maynard Smith and George Price.
With R.R. Baker and V.G.F. Smith in 1972, he developed a theory for the evolution of anisogamy and the two sexes, which is now widely accepted.
In 1974 he proposed that the outcome of animal fighting behaviour is determined by the relative values of the contested resource to each contestant and their assessments of relative resource holding potentials. This led to the introduction of asymmetries between contestants in early evolutionary game theory. Parker also made the first theoretical analysis of sexual conflict in evolution in 1979.
Up to the early 1970s, most ethologists and ecologists had interpreted adaptations in terms of "survival value to the species". However, the paradigm shift of the gene-centric view of evolution shortly afterwards overturned this idea: mainstream views in behavioural ecology and sociobiology saw natural selection restored to Darwinian principles in terms of survival value to the individual. Parker's work has played a part in this shift, especially in the development of behavioural ecology.

Awards and distinctions