January 5, 1997

An obituary for Vero Copner Wynne-Edwards  (July 4, 1906 to January 5, 1997) at the British Birds website, gives a subtle portrait of this major thinker and ornithologist:

'....Vero Copner Wynne-Edwards DSc FRS CBE... In the death of Vero Wynne-Edwards ('Wynne') aged 90 on 5th January, we have lost a fine athlete, a versatile naturalist, a constructive Head of Department, and a controversial theoretician of international stature. The third son of die Rev. Canon J. R. WynneEdwards, born on 4th July 1906, he was reared in the Yorkshire Dales and educated at Leeds Grammar School, Rugby School and New College, Oxford, where he was awarded a First and became Senior Student. ....[Later Wynne ]moved to the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, where he surveyed the local Common Starling Sturnus vulgaris roosts while cycling to visit Jeannie in Exeter (at least 74 km each way), and they married when he moved on to Bristol. In his Starling report in British Birds...he was already speculating about the reasons for birds' social behaviour. In 1930, he became Associate Professor at McGill University, Montreal. There, he made his name with a major review of the seabirds of the North Atlantic, based on his transects between Britain and Canada, and expeditions to the Arctic, also contributing to a census of gannetries {Moms bassanus) and speculating about non-breeding by some Fulmars ... Fulmarus ghcialis and seabird population dynamics. The first seabird atlas in the World, for eastern Canada, was dedicated to him, Les Tuck and Finn Salomonsen; and his son, Hugh, and daughter, Janet, have founded a dynasty of biologists in Canada, including seven grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. In 1945, he returned, as Regius Professor of Natural History, to Aberdeen, where he remained until he retired in 1974. He built up the Department from a small but happy band lurking in a rat-hole in a corner of Marischal Quadrangle to garrison a huge new mock-medieval fortress in old Aberdeen. His student, George Dunnet, undertook more work on Fulmars and then other forms of oil pollution in the Scottish islands, and established the famous Culterty Field Station on the Ythan Estuary up the coast. One associated unit under David Jenkins worked on Grouse and Moorland Ecology inland, and another on birds at sea, until they were nationalised. Wynne also served on numerous committees, becoming chairman of several, including the Natural Environment Research Council during 1968-71, also President of the BOU from 1965 to 1970 ... Wynne's most important contribution to biology, possibly the most important since that by Charles Darwin, was to direct more attention to the role of social behaviour in population dynamics. He disagreed with the emphasis placed on competition for food by David Lack in ...[Lack's] book The Natural Regulation of Animal Numbers in 1954, and embarked on a vast review of Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behaviour (1962) to show that animals have developed ways to limit its effect. Unfortunately, instead of taking as much care as the Original Evolutionist to forestall critics, he left an opening for complaints that he was not a good Darwinist because his 'group selection' conferred no advantage on individuals. All around the World, obscure people emerged from back rooms to declare such a novel suggestion heretical, editors began to refuse his contributions, and it became academic suicide for a student to mention him. Perhaps, now that more examples of organisms co-operating successfully emerge daily, posterity may give him more credit? While it is possible to find political parallels to the argument over whether the world works through competition or co-operation, he showed no awareness of it. Indeed, he was rather conservative in his views, until, at the end of his career, he signed the Blueprint for Survival, calling for limits to economic growth during the most expansive phase of the Heath government of the early 1970s. When I later found him sitting alone in the Common Room and congratulated him upon his CBE, he gave me a little lecture about how people are assessed for these honours, while I thought sadly 'If only you had not signed that document, you might have made a useful Life Peer.' In person, he was lightly built and wiry, with an open, engaging manner. While firmly convinced of the rightness of his own ideas, he did not impose them on others, and was always interested in their problems; so, while not a strong chairman of committees, he was universally liked. Socially, he was elusive, spending his spare time on feats of endurance in the hills, preferably on skis. To us, he embodied the spirit of the sunlit uplands, and we hope that he is now happy surveying the wildlife of the Elysian Fields.'

V.C. Wynne-Edwards in Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behaviour, uses the example, of birds dispersing, as a group which can be subject to evolution. This dispersal, he notes, can be set off by, among other things, the hiss of a cat.

To put the theoretical ideas of Wynne-Edwards in context, here is another excerpt:

'To understand how this the new world view dramatically altered the culture of mainstream science in the mid ’70s, one needs to comprehend exactly what was being discussed among evolutionary biologists at the time. The main debate concerned two topics: group selection and kin selection....The group selection debate was exacerbated by V.C. Wynne-Edward’s book Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behaviour, which argued that behavior adaptations had evolved by group selection: the survival of some groups and the extinction of others.

'Many biologists were extremely skeptical about Wynne-Edwards’s thesis, and argued that natural selection typically acts by favoring some individuals, but not some populations.
During this period, English biologist W.D. Hamilton proposed another theory about how natural selection acts....Hamilton’s thesis—now more commonly referred to as kin selection—follows the neo-Darwinian synthesis, which centers on the gene as the unit of natural selection. Genes, Hamilton postulated, are what encourage social altruism and cooperation between related species....Dawkins, while acknowledging the debt we owe to Hamilton, claimed that Hamilton would have been wiser to adopt a full blooded “gene’s eye” view of evolution. ...'

We are giving this round to Wynne-Edwards, whose perspicuity is illustrated in this quote:'...[The feline] claw is kept sharp, in the same manner a pencil is repointed with a penknife -- a fact that though doubtless known for centuries to observant people--has generally evaded zoologists.'