| Administrative History | Vero Wynne-Edwards was a British ethnologist and naturalist, whose writings on group selection in evolution became the focus of debate among theorists in the 1960s and 1970s. Professor Wynne-Edwards championed the theory that natural selection acts on both individuals in social groups and on each group as a whole in relation to its environment. This theory pitted behavioural ecologists against proponents of the Darwinian theory of evolution. He was appointed to the regius chair of natural history at Aberdeen, remaining in that post until his retirement in 1974. He was also Vice-Principal for the two years previous to his retirement. |
| Description | Interview with Professor Vero Wynne Edwards introduced by Duncan Heddle. Recorded on 19 November 1985.
Transcript of Interview :
I'm going to turn now more directly to my own activities. Before I came to Aberdeen I had devoted considerable research to the ecology of sea birds, both in their breeding colonies and in their lives when out to sea. I had been on expeditions to sub-arctic and arctic Canada, in Labrador and Baffin Island and also far to the north west to the mouth of the Mackenzie and to the Yukon territory.
Besides birds, I had a research interest in fish and fisheries. In my early years after coming to Aberdeen I made summer trips to Finnish Lapland in 1948 and twice more to Baffin Island in 1950 and 1953. An important theoretical problem was increasingly engaging my attention at that time. Fishing fleets from Aberdeen and other parts around the North Sea had, of course, been suffering since the turn of the century from over-fishing. The chronic depletion of fish stocks, resulting from the fact that anybody can claim the right to fish. And that even although the stocks were much reduced, it was still possible for those in the industry to make a living. Much the same is true of the grazing of live-stock on common land. The chronic tendency is to overstock the ground, and thus to deplete the fertility of the soil. At the worst, human exploitation and living resources has led to the collapse and the destruction of the resource. As with the world's whale fisheries and the irretrievable reduction of pastures in arid sub-Saharan Africa to desert. Most animals are exploiters of living foods essentially similar to the ones that are utilised by man. Then it is clear that if populations of a particular animal species were unable to increase far enough, they too would be able to deplete and perhaps similarly destroy those resources. In nature we occasionally see examples of over exploitation, for instance when a plague of caterpillars completely defoliates a tree, but it is sufficiently uncommon to emphasise the fact that it is very much an exception to the norm. Normally the consumers live in balance with their resources year in and year out in a relationship which is sustainable indefinitely. Our own over-exploitation of fish, furs, pastures and forests can be prevented by regulating the cropping rate and keeping it within the capacity of the resource to renew between crop and the next. The fact that animal consumers normally do the same is inherent in what we call the 'balance of nature', which depends an having a sustainable relationship between animal consumers and their food supplies. This suggested to me that the territorial systems and the social hierarchies that develop among groups of individuals which are of such common occurrence in natural populations, are mechanisms for regulating the population density and excluding surplus individuals from access to their local food resources. I was aware, too, that some species have long-lived individuals and some shorter lived apes, and their respective fecundities or reproductive rates are generally adjusted accordingly to what their respective life-spans may make necessary.
My oceanic birds, for instance. Although they belong to several unrelated types or families are characteristically long-lived and the females of many of the species never lay more than one egg a year. I started to write a book on this theme in 1955. It was clearly a very big and broad subject and there was already much evidence about it scattered over a large literature. It was also a particularly exciting subject for two reasons - the simpler of them being, that to regulate their population the individuals in any group would have to cooperate together and in this appeared to lie the seeds of social relationships and the ecological origin of the whole phenomenon of sociality in animals.
The second reason had to do with evolutionary theory: Darwin taught us long ago that evolution depended an there being a struggle for existence. It led to a self selective process whereby the fittest individuals survived best and became the parents for the succeeding generation. If that were true, the yardstick for individual fitness must be a success in parenthood, and if the most productive parents were thus selected in every generation, heredity would always tend to make productiveness increase until every species had reached the maximum fecundity attainable. It was clear to me that no such maximising of fertility had in fact come into existence among animal species. Not only was the average fecundity in any given species normally related inversely to the average life expectancy, as if one of those variables had been adjusted to match the other, but, if as I suppose individuals were programmed to cooperate with one another to regulate their population density, they would require to control their reproductive rates as being one of the most powerful tools in the regulation process. To cut this long story short, what seemed to me to have happened in evolution, was that local social groups had tended to vary among themselves in their degree of success in adjusting their population density to the carrying capacity of their food resources. Those that succeeded best would have flourished most and survived longest. The consequence would have been a slow selection between one local group and another and it would have had a very different effect from the selection that occurred exclusively between individuals to which orthodox Darwinists adhered.
These profound and exciting possibilities were obviously open to investigation and test, at least in part, now that one saw what to look for. So that as well as getting busy on the book, I began casting round to think up and plan appropriate research projects. It so happened that while this ferment was brewing, the Scottish Land Owners Federation got in touch with me to see if I would undertake a scientific enquiry into why the numbers of red grouse on Scottish moors had fallen into such distressing decline during the previous 30 years. I saw at once that if we could discover how grouse populations are regulated, we might be able to give the landowners a constructive answer and to test my own ideas at the same time: did grouse regulate their own numbers through systems of territories and social competition, as I predicted? And if they did, were population densities that resulted ultimately related to the quantity and the quality of the food the moor produced and to the need to conserve the supply? I set up what came to be known as the Unit of Grouse and Moorland Ecology in 1956. I expected it might take several years to get results. The landowners undertook to fund the unit for three years and I obtained an undertaking from the Nature Conservancy to consider taking it over if, at the end of this trial period, it showed sufficient promise. In fact, it has been successful far beyond expectation and now, almost thirty years later, it is still in existence and is known by repute to ecologists all over the world. After the first twelve years it was transferred from the university to the Natural Environment Research Council and now it has become a component part of the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology at Banchory, which was assembled around it in 1972. For the last twenty years and more, its leader has been Dr. Adam Watson, an outstanding and versatile honours graduate and Ph.D. of Aberdeen in the 1950s.
It was obviously desirable to invest in other parallel research projects as well, and to build up the Zoology Department as an active centre for teaching and research in animal ecology into the bargain. What we needed was a suitably located field station where staff and students could have a laboratory base far their field investigations and experiments. I therefore jumped at the chance of acquiring Culterty House at Newburgh for the University when its owner, my late friend Dr. Edgar Smith, was obliged to move out of it for health reasons in 1956. There are three artificial ponds in the grounds, and on them the Smiths had built up a fine collection of ornamental waterfowl. Principal Taylor fortunately knew Edgar Smith, and Culterty, well and took enthusiastically to the project I outlined to him. He quickly obtained a capital grant from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland in order to buy the property, and got an undertaking from the University Court to finance its basic upkeep. I invited Dr. George Dunnet to came back from Australia, where he had gone five years before, to become the Field Station's Director and in his hands it has gone from strength to strength. He was, incidentally, another gifted Aberdeen graduate of the 1950s, and of course he later became my successor in the Natural History Chair.
With these and many more demands an my time in the late 1950s, the writing of my book progressed only slowly. It was eventually published in Edinburgh in 1962 with the title Animal dispersion in relation to social behaviour. A big book, with 650 pages. The evolutionary side of it ,and the inference that group selection has been an extremely important evolutionary force, quickly became, and still is, a hot centre of controversy. But the book opened up a wide vista of new research. I have lectured about it in five continents and contributed to many symposia an the subject. An article in the Scientific American in 1964 summarising the hypothesis has since sold 360,000 offprints and the book itself has featured as a citation classic in the science citation index. Although the circumstantial evidence for group selection was very strong even in 1962, I could not see how to refute the claim of my critics which was: how a population consisting of cooperative individuals, controlling their reproduction and numbers in order to ensure that future crops continued to appear in due season, could avoid being supplanted by selfish individuals who did not play according to the rules, but exploited the system for personal gain instead. I could not explain how prudent restraint for the common good could preserve the upper hand against ruthless invaders. As a result, group selection had been dismissed as an effective evolutionary force by the vast majority of evolutionists. Only after my retirement brought leisure to ponder the problem did I think the puzzle out. Fortified especially by the revelations of the grouse research, I then came to realise that populations that acted prudentially, husbanding and managing their food resources, if they continued to perpetuate themselves on the same ground would give birth to every new generation in a land of plenty. In contrast, populations of ruthless individuals seeking to maximise their progeny production in their own lifetimes, would be compulsive asset-strippers, tending to leave their habitats poorer than they found them. The idea that selfish individuals would oust the faithful preservationists is a total misconception, and in fact populations containing self-seekers would, as individuals, be less productive because of chronic asset-stripping, and these populations would be handicapped in proportion to the frequency of individualists they contain. Selfishness would not result in exterminating conformist stocks. In fact, resource husbandry is an unbeatable strategy far the survival of the stock. In the last few years, I have put this answer to the riddle into a new bank called Evolution through Group Selection and I am now eagerly awaiting its publication in a few months time.
End of transcript |