Allan C. Wilson; Theorized Common Ancestor for All Humans

Allan C. Wilson, the evolutionary biologist who theorized in 1987 that all humans have a common ancestor who lived in Africa 200,000 years ago, has died.

A spokesman for UC Berkeley said Monday that the professor of biochemistry and molecular biology died Sunday night in Seattle of leukemia. He was 56 and had gone there for a bone marrow transplant on June 17.

Wilson’s controversial theory, in which he espoused the case of a woman he called Eve--”the mother of us all”--grew out of his conviction that proteins and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) could be used as “molecular clocks” to chart the evolution of life on Earth.

His hypothesis was that proteins and genes change at a constant rate and thus they could serve as an indicator of the time since separate species had a common ancestry.

His collaborator, Vincent M. Sarich, said Monday that “before, evolutionary relationships were deduced from anatomical comparisons.” The idea of the molecular clock, he added, provides an independent measure of these relationships.

Wilson’s research began about 25 years ago when he first studied genes and their building blocks, DNA, as a blueprint of evolution. By the 1960s he and his colleagues proposed the now-accepted theory that apes and humans evolved from lineages that split off from each other 5 million years ago.

For the past 10 years Wilson concentrated on DNA in the mitochondrion, an energy-producing organ inside every cell that contains its own complement of genes separate from the genes in the nucleus of the cell.

These are inherited only from the mother and produced his theory of Eve, the common mother, which remains a topic of lively debate in the scientific world.

A native of New Zealand, Wilson joined the Berkeley faculty in 1964, three years after receiving his doctorate there. He was named a prestigious MacArthur Fellow in 1986 and a Guggenheim Fellow twice during his career. He was a member of the Royal Society of London, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Achievement and the Human Genome Organization.

He lived in Berkeley and is survived by his wife, Leona, and two children.