Some Influential Colleagues and Ideas

Influential colleagues and Ideas

Some Influential Colleagues

In September 1970 my wife Sandra and I immigrated to the UK from South Arica, for me to take up a lectureship in the Zoology Department of Newcastle University. This essay is about how this came about and the role of the Head of Zoology, Professor Robert Clark in bringing it about.

Bob, as we called him, was ever a remote figure as was usual in the days when the title ‘Professor’ meant something, so I was never privy to his plans for me or for the Zoology Department. Nevertheless I own him a great debt of gratitude for bringing me to the UK with its professional opportunities. Conjecture leads me to the conclusion that, probably encouraged by Professor Leonard Beadle, Bob brought me to the UK to develop ecology as a major subject in the Zoology Department. At the same time Dr Stewart Evans was appointed to carry out the same role for animal behaviour. Such a plan would have made sense as both ecology and behaviour were subjects popular with students in a department previously dominated by physiology and palaeontology. I was to join Norman Philipson a senior ecologist already in post. I was to learn later how lucky I was to have Norman as a friend and colleague. Norma and I were provided with a large modern laboratory with capacity for at least a dozen research students and a full time staff demonstrator post. Here was a grand and generous innovation owed entirely to Bob. 

                                                          Professor Arthur Cain FRS

                                                                     Dr Alec Panchen

                                                              Professor Leonard Beadle

                                                          Professor Margaret Kalk

Some transformative Lectures

Striking in my memory is an Arthur Cain lecture on systematics given as a guest lecture at Wits University Zoology Department in the late 50s when I was an undergraduate. In those days, at least at Wits, undergraduate work was heavily focused on systematics and comparative anatomy so Cain’s lecture was timely for me in bringing together these two themes. Strangely no one had attempted to do this for us before. Dr Cain, as he was then, was a fine orator, making his subject both exciting and memorable.

 I cannot neglect a lecture by a Dr Brink from the Bernard Price Palaeontology Institute at Wits entitle The Thermal Barrier. We students were familiar with the concept of the water barriers to the colonisation of land but the idea of a thermal barrier was new to us. So stimulated were we that some of us, including my future wife Sandra Bosazza and my brother Ian both made palaeontology a focus of their interests thereafter.

A guest lecture by the eminent John Maynard Smith, another fine orator, turned everything on its head with a title something like A Chicken is the Eggs Way of Making Another Egg. This is typical of him. A great innovator, he is responsible for the theory of evolutionary stable strategies (EES) and Game Theory which reinforced my budding interest in natural selection.

A Book

I add here one book of considerable influence entitle Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Gould, 1977). S. J. Gould’ moves away from the adult centric zoology in fashion for many years, to a focus on the life cycle of organisms. This is just what I needed to move my study of the ecology of the common chironomid midge from the feeding larva stages to the reproducing adult (McLachlan & Ladle, 2001)( McLachlan, 2013).

References

Beadle, L. C. Obituary. Arch. Hydrobiol. 108, 583-587.

Cain, A. (1999). Obituary. Nature, 401, 872.

Gould, S. J. (1977). Ontogeny and Phylogeny. London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Kalk, M., McLachlan, A. J., & Howard-Williams, C. (Eds.). (1979). Lake Chilwa: Studies of change in a tropical ecosystem (Vol. 35). London: Dr. W. Junk.

McLachlan, A. J., & Ladle, R. (2001). Life in the puddle: behavioural and life-cycle adaptations in the Diptera of tropical rain pools. Biological Reviews 76, 377-388.

McLachlan, A. J., & Ladle, R. (2011). Barriers to Adaptive Reasoning in Community Ecology. Biological Reviews, 86, 543-548.

Williams, G. C. (1966). Adaptation and Natural Selection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Wynne-Edwards. (1962). Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behaviour. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd.