Professor Thomas (Tom) Cavalier-Smith (born
October 21 1942),
FRS,
FRSC,
NERC Professorial Fellow, is a
Professor of
Evolutionary Biology in the Department of Zoology, at the
University of Oxford. He was presented with the
International Prize for Biology (a prize of 10 million
yen) in 2004 .Cavalier-Smith has published extensively on the
classification of
protists. One of his major contributions to biology was his proposal of a sixth
kingdom of life: the
Chromista, although the evidence for the existence of the group is still open to debate. He also proposed that all chromista and
alveolata share the same common ancestor, a claim later supported by studies of morphological and molecular evidence by other labs. He named this new group the
Chromalveolates. It is also he who proposed and named many other high-rank taxa, like
Opisthokonta (1987),
Rhizaria (2002) or
Excavata (2002). Together with Chromalveolata,
Amoebozoa (he emended their description in 1998) and
Archaeplastida (which he called Plantae since 1981) the six form the basis of current taxonomy of
eukaryotes. Prof. Cavalier-Smith has also published prodigiously on issues such as the origin of various
cellular organelles (including the
nucleus,
mitochondria),
genome size evolution, and
endosymbiosis. Though fairly well known, many of his strongest claims have been controversial and have not gained widespread acceptance in the
scientific community to date.
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