Vero Copner Wynne-Edwards, CBE, FRS, FRSE (4 July 1906 – 5 January 1997) was an English zoologist and evolutionary theorist who held professorships in biology and zoology at McGill University and the University of Aberdeen. is best known for his early advocacy of group selection, which suggests that natural selection can select for trait variation of a group, rather than an individual or gene (as in the gene-centric view of evolution).
Early life and education Wynne-Edwards was born in Leeds on 4 July 1906, the son of Reverend John Rosindale Wynne-Edwards and his wife, Lilian Agnes Streatfield. His father was the canon of Ripon Cathedral and headmaster at Leeds Grammar School, where he received his early schooling. In 1920 at age 13, he was sent to boarding school at Rugby School in Warwickshire. He then pursued a degree in zoology at New College, Oxford University, studying under the ecologist and pioneer of population ecology Charles Sutherland Elton, and received his degree in 1927.
Career After graduating from Oxford in 1927, Wynne-Edwards took a position at the Plymouth Laboratory of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom at Citadel Hill, Plymouth, as part of an overall growth in staff and research efforts from increased scientific funding in the UK during the inter-war period. His primary project was studying the diverse male ecotypes of the crustacean Jassa falcata, and during this period he married his former Oxford classmate, Jeannie Morris. In 1929, he accepted a junior faculty position at the University of Bristol, but within a few months was offered an assistant professorship at McGill University, which he accepted, relocating with his wife to Montreal, Canada. On his trans-Atlantic voyage, Wynne-Edwards thoroughly documented the basic distributions of several marine bird species, documenting for the first time ecological boundaries between inshore, offshore, and pelagic marine zones, for which he was awarded the Walker Prize from the Boston Natural History Society. His lecturing position was partially interrupted by the Second World War, during which he served in the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve. After the war's conclusion, he was offered a Regius Professorship in Natural History by the University of Aberdeen, which he accepted and held until his retirement in 1974. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1950, proposed by Cyril Edward Lucas, Sir Maurice Yonge, Charles W. Parsons and John Berry, and awarded the Society's Patrick Neill Medal for the period 1973–75. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1974 and was given an honorary doctorate (LLD) by the University of Aberdeen.
Advocacy of group selection Wynne-Edwards was best known for espousing a form of group selection that operates at the level of the species, most notably in his 1962 book, Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behaviour. In it, he argued that many behaviors evolved for the good of groups of the species as a whole, rather than at a lower level of organization. For example, he argued that species have adaptive population-regulatory mechanisms. His arguments were vigorously criticized by George C. Williams in his Adaptation and Natural Selection, a debate summarized by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. David Sloan Wilson and E. O. Wilson characterised Wynne-Edwards' theory "naive group selection", since it did not use quantitative models. But they also provided examples of rigorous models that can predict his field observations. Among the mechanisms that Wynne-Edwards proposed was population regulation, based on the communication of population density by what he called epideictic displays, in which individuals advertised their genitals. If a population was becoming too dense, such displays would result in reduced breeding across the population, contrary to Darwinian natural selection but in line with Wynne-Edwards's group selection. The mechanism has never been demonstrated unequivocally.
Fellow of the Royal Society In 1970 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. His candidature citation read
Wynne-Edwards is noted for his many contributions to ecology. His early work was on social and other forms of rhythmic behaviour in birds. Later work on North Atlantic birds disclosed the existence of inshore, offshore and pelagic zones, each with a characteristic avian fauna. These categories have been found to apply generally to all oceans, and have been adopted as standard by later authors. His most important work has been on population dynamics in relation to social behaviour. It provides an hypothesis of homeostatic control of population density in animals at an optimum level, with a primary and universal function of sociality. Wynne-Edwards directs two research teams devoted to this work. He has also published papers on the animals and plants of the Arctic.
Personal life and family He married Jeannie Morris in 1929, and the couple had a son, Hugh (1934–2013), who returned to Canada after the family relocated back to Aberdeen in 1947, receiving his PhD in geological sciences from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario in 1956, and joining the faculty of his alma mater from 1959 to 1972, when he took a position at the University of British Columbia as Professor and Head of Geological Sciences. He was later made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1969, and an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1991. His granddaughter, Katherine Wynne-Edwards, is Professor Emeritus of comparative biology at the University of Calgary. After his retirement from the university there, Wynne-Edwards remained with his wife in Aberdeenshire, moving to Banchory, where he died on 5 January, 1997.
Books Wynne-Edwards, V.C. (1962). Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behavior. London: Oliver & Boyd – via Internet Archive. Wynne-Edwards, Vero Copner (1986). Evolution through group selection. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific. ISBN 0-632-01541-1 – via Internet Archive.
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