Question: Who is your favourite scientist?

Sam Tazzyman answered on 14 Jun 2011:

Does it have to be a scientist who is still alive? If so I think I would say Geoff Parker, who is a recently-retired professor at the University of Liverpool. He is a really nice man, and also he thought up lots of cool ideas in evolutionary biology in the 1970s. An example is that he was one of the first people to think about the fact that competition between animals for reproduction doesn’t necessarily end with sex: in lots of species the females mate with more than one male during the breeding season, and the sperm from the different males has to compete to fertilise the eggs inside the female. People hadn’t thought about this before, and it is still being researched now (for example by me).