Bioinformatics for Evolutionary Biologists:

Abstract

Evolutionary biologists have two types of ancestors: naturalists such as Charles Darwin (1809–1892) and theoreticians such as Ronald A. Fisher (1890–1962). The intellectual descendants of these two scientists have traditionally formed quite separate tribes. However, the distinction between naturalists and theoreticians is rapidly fading these days: Many naturalists spend most of their time in front of computers analyzing their data, and quite a few theoreticians are starting to collect their own data. The reason for this coalescence between theory and experiment is that two hitherto expensive technologies have become so cheap, they are now essentially free: computing and sequencing. Computing became affordable in the early 1980s with the advent of the PC.