James W. Valentine

James William Valentine ( born November 10, 1926 in Los Angeles, California) is an American geologist, paleontologist and evolutionary biologist.

Life and work

Valentine studied at the Phillips University in Enid (Bachelor 1951) and the University of California, Los Angeles ( UCLA), with Master's degree in 1954 and Ph.D. in geology in 1958. Afterwards, he was Assistant Professor and Associate Professor at the University of Missouri, interrupted of a time as a Fulbright Scholar from 1962 to 1963 in Australia. In 1964 he became associate professor and then professor at the University of California, Davis. 1977 to 1990 he was professor of geology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since 1990 he is Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is Professor Emeritus from 1993. He is there with the Museum of Paleontology connected (as curator) and the Center for Integrative Genomics.

In the 1950s and 1960s, he studied marine molluscs of the Pleistocene in California and their paleoecology and biogeography. In the late 1960s he developed a hierarchical access patterns in biodiversity especially marine invertebrate fossils and the influence of plate tectonics on biodiversity. From the 1970s, he dealt with the origin of the main lineages ( phyla ) in the animal kingdom, set out in his book On the Origin of Phyla in 2004, and examined (some with Francisco Ayala ) the genetic variability of marine organisms and raised 1976, the importance of studying gene regulation in explaining differences in evolutionary rates in paleontology forth. With Dobzhansky, Stebbins and Ayala, he wrote a standard work on evolution.

Valentine is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America. In 1973/74 he was president of the Paleontological Society, whose medal he received. In 2004 he received the Lapworth Medal. He was Guggenheim Fellow.

He is married to Diane Mondragon since 1987 and has a son and a daughter.