Nicholas Hamilton Barton FRS FRSE (born 30 August 1955) is a British evolutionary biologist.
[3][4][5][6][7][8] Barton was educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge where he graduated with a first-class degree in biological sciences in 1976 and gained his PhD supervised by Godfrey Hewitt at the University of East Anglia in 1979.
Professor Barton is best known for his work on hybrid zones, often using the toad Bombina bombina as a study organism, and for extending the mathematical machinery needed to investigate multilocus genetics, a field in which he worked in collaboration with Michael Turelli.
Research questions he has investigated include: the role of epistasis, the evolution of sex, speciation, and the limits on the rate of adaptation.
In 2007, Barton, along with Derek E.G. Briggs, Jonathan A. Eisen, David B. Goldstein, and Nipam H. Patel, collaborated to create Evolution,[2] an undergraduate textbook which integrates molecular biology, genomics, and human genetics with traditional evolutionary studies.