Born in 1967 in England, Professor Andrew Parker moved to Australia in 1990 where he spent ten years studying marine biology and physics. On returning to the UK as a Royal Society University Research Fellow at Oxford University in 1999, he worked on colour, vision, biomimetics and evolution. In 2000, based on his ‘Light Switch Theory’ for the cause of the Big Bang in evolution, he was selected as one of the top eight scientists in the UK as a ‘Scientist for the New Century’ by The Royal Institution (London).
The Light Switch Theory holds that the Big Bang of evolution, around 520 million years ago, was triggered by the evolution of the eye. Announced in 1998, this is the probable solution to the most dramatic event in the history of life, most famously supported by Francis Crick (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA). It made worldwide news.
Today Andrew works at The Natural History Museum, London (as a Research Leader), Green Templeton College (University of Oxford) and is a Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Andrew’s scientific research centres on the evolution of vision and on biomimetics – extracting good design from nature. He has copied the natural nanotechnology behind the metallic-like wings of butterflies and iridescence of birds of paradise to produce commercial products such as security devices (that can’t be copied) to replace holograms in credit cards and non-reflective surfaces for solar panels (providing a 10% increase in energy capture). He is commissioned by international companies.
He wrote the popular science books In the Blink of an Eye and Seven Deadly Colours (Simon & Schuster, UK; Perseus, USA), and regularly speaks at literary/arts festivals as well as scientific institutions. In 2005 he gave the annual Hewlett Packard lecture on evolution and the prestigious Stanford University annual physics lecture on colour in nature.
The evolutionary event revealed in In the Blink of an Eye, which covers the sudden introduction of the greatest weapon of all (vision), will be converted to produce predictive software. This will be used to encourage businesses to reduce their environmental footprint, as part of HRH The Prince of Wales’ Accounting for Sustainability programme.