David Lack

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David Lack

Born 16 July 1910(1910-07-16)
London
Died 12 March 1973 (aged 62)
Nationality British
Fields Ornithology

David Lambert Lack FRS, (16 July 1910 – 12 March 1973) was a British ornithologist and biologist.[1]

Contents

[edit] Early life

Lack was born in London and educated at Gresham's School, Holt, Norfolk, and Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he studied Natural Sciences. He was the oldest of four children of Harry Lambert Lack MD FRCS, who later became President of the British Medical Association.[2] The name 'Lack' is derived from 'Lock'. His father grew up in a farming family from Norfolk and became a leading ear, nose and throat surgeon at the London Hospital. Although his father had some interest in birds as a boy it does not appear that he influenced David's interest. His mother Kathleen was the daughter of Lt. Col. McNeil Rind of the Indian army. Kathleen's father was Scottish and on her mother's side was part Irish, Greek and Georgian.[3]

Until the age of fifteen, Lack lived in a large house in Devonshire Place, London. By the age of nine, he had learnt the names of most birds and had written out an alphabetically arranged life-list.[3]

[edit] Career

After Cambridge, he became a schoolmaster at Dartington Hall School, Devonshire until 1940, when he took three months off to study bird behaviour on the Galapagos Islands. During World War II he served in the British Army working on radar research. After hostilities ended he was made Director of the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology at Oxford University (1945-1973). His wartime experience enabled him to make radar observations of bird migration.

Lack's work in ornithology was almost entirely based on studies of the living bird. He was one of the pioneers of life-history studies in Britain, especially those based on quantitative approaches, when some traditional ornithologists of the time were focussing their studies on morphology and geographic distribution.[4] Lack's major scientific research included work on population biology and density dependent regulation. His work suggested that natural selection favoured clutch sizes that ensured the greatest number of surviving young. This interpretation was however debated by V.C. Wynne-Edwards who suggested that clutch-size was density-independent. This was one of the earliest debates on group selection. Lack's studies were based on nidicolous birds and some recent studies have suggested that this may not hold for other groups such as seabirds.[5]

He wrote numerous papers in ornithological journals, and had a knack of choosing memorable titles: he once claimed to have single-handedly caused the renaming of a group of birds through the submission of a scientific paper, his 1935 publication, "Territory and polygamy in a bishop bird, Euplectes hordeacea hordeacea (Linn.)" in the journal Ibis. Up to that point birds in the genus Euplectes had been referred to simply as bishops, but the journal editor felt that with that form the title might cause misunderstanding.

[edit] Darwin's finches

Lack's most famous work is Darwin's Finches, a landmark study whose title linked Darwin's name with the Galapagos group of species. It is often forgotten that there are two versions of this work, and they differ significantly in their conclusions. The first is a book-length monograph, written after his visit to the Galapagos, but not published until 1945. [6] In it Lack interprets the differences in bill size as species recognition signals, that is, as isolating mechanisms.

The second is the later book in which the differences in bill size are interpreted as adaptations to specific food niches, an interpretation that has since been abundantly confirmed. [7][8] This change of mind, according to Lack's Preface, came about as a result of his reflections on his own data whilst he was doing war work. The effect of this change in interpretation is to put the emphasis for speciation onto natural selection for appropriate food handling instead of seeing it primarily as a by-product of an isolating mechanism. In this way his work contributed to the modern evolutionary synthesis, in which natural selection came to be seen as the prime mover in evolution, and not random or mutational events. Lack's work laid the foundations for the much more extensive work of Grant and his colleagues. [9] Also, Lack's work feeds into studies of island biogeography which continue the same range of issues presented by the Galapagos fauna on a more varied canvas. [10]

"The person who more than any one else deserves credit for reviving an interest in the ecological significance of species was David Lack[11]... It is now quite clear that that the process of speciation is not completed by [isolation] but requires also the acquisition of adaptations that permit co-existence with potential competitors." Mayr op cit p275.

[edit] Religious beliefs

Lack became a convert to Anglicanism, which led to his composition, in 1957, of a brief book, Evolutionary theory and Christian belief, on the relationship between Christian faith and evolutionary theory. This book foreshadows, in some ways, the non-overlapping magisteria conception of the relationship between religion and science later popularized by Stephen Jay Gould.
Arthur Cain remarked of him "David Lack was the only religious man I knew at that period who did not allow his religion to dictate his view of natural selection." [12]

[edit] Career outline

The Common Swift
The Common Swift

[edit] Honours

[edit] Major publications

[edit] Books

  • Lack, David. 1943. The life of the Robin. Witherby, London.
  • Lack, David. 1947. Darwin's Finches. Cambridge University Press (reissued in 1961 by Harper, New York, with a new preface by Lack; reissued in 1983 by Cambridge University Press with an introduction and notes by Laurene M. Ratcliffe and Peter T. Boag). ISBN 0-521-25243-1
  • Lack, David. 1950. Robin Redbreast. Oxford. (A new edition of this book, revised and expanded by Lack's son Andrew, was published under the title Redbreast: the Robin in life and literature by SMH Books in 2008.)
  • Lack, David. 1954. The natural regulation of animal numbers. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
  • Lack, David. 1956. Swifts in a tower. Methuen, London.
  • Lack, David. 1957. Evolutionary theory and Christian belief: the unresolved conflict. Methuen, London.
  • Lack, David. 1966. Population studies of birds. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
  • Lack, David. 1968. Ecological adaptations for breeding in birds. Methuen, London.
  • Lack, David. 1971. Ecological isolation in birds. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. and Blackwell, Oxford.
  • Lack, David. 1976. Island biology illustrated by the land birds of Jamaica. University of California Press, Berkeley. ISBN 0-520-03007-9 (posthumously).

[edit] Selected papers

  • Lack, David. 1940. Evolution of the Galapagos finches. Nature 146:324–327.
  • Lack, David. 1942. Ecological features of the bird faunas of British small islands. Journal of Animal Ecology 11:9–36.
  • Lack, David. 1945. The Galapagos finches (Geospizinae): a study in variation. Occasional Papers of the California Academy of Sciences 21:i-vii, 1–152.
  • Lack, David. 1947-8. The significance of clutch-size. Ibis 89, 302-52; 90, 25–45.
  • Lack, David 1949. The significance of reproductive isolation. In Jepsen G, Mayr E and Simpson GG (eds) Genetics, paleontology and evolution. Princeton.
  • Lack, David. 1954. The evolution of reproductive rates. In Huxley J, Hardy AC and Ford EB (eds). Evolution as a process. Allen & Unwin, London.
  • Lack, David. 1973. The numbers of species of hummingbirds in the West Indies. Evolution 27:326–337.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Charles H. Blake (1974). Obituary, The Auk, 91 (1) : 239 Obituary
  2. ^ Harry Lambert Lack, MD FRCS, obituary in Journal of Laryngology & Otology (Cambridge University Press, 1943), 58, pp 135-136
  3. ^ a b Thorpe, W. H. (1974) David Lambert Lack. 1910-1973. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 20: 271-293
  4. ^ Johnson K. 2004. The Ibis: transformations in a twentieth century British natural history journal. Journal of the History of Biology. 37 (3): 515-555. DOI: 10.1007/s10739-004-1499-3
  5. ^ R.C. Ydenberg and D.F. Bertram 1989. Lack's clutch size hypothesis and brood enlargement studies on colonial seabirds. Colonial Waterbirds. 12 (1): 134-137. doi:10.2307/1521328
  6. ^ Lack, David. 1945. The Galapagos finches (Geospizinae): a study in variation. Occasional Papers of the California Academy of Sciences 21:i-vii, 1–152.
  7. ^ Lack, David 1947. Darwin's Finches. Cambridge University Press (reissued in 1961 by Harper, New York, with a new preface by Lack)
  8. ^ Mayr, Ernst 1982. The growth of biological thought. Harvard, Cambs MA. p274-5
  9. ^ Grant, Peter R. 1999. Ecology and evolution of Darwin's finches. Princeton NJ.
  10. ^ MacArthur R. and Wilson E.O. 1967. The theory of island biogeography. Princeton 1967.
  11. ^ Lack, David 1949. The significance of reproductive isolation. In Jepsen G, Mayr E and Simpson GG (eds) Genetics, paleontology and evolution. Princeton.
  12. ^ Cain A.J. and Provine W.B. 1991. Genes and ecology in history. In Berry R.J. et al (eds) Genes in ecology: the 33rd Symposium of the British Ecological Society. Blackwell, Oxford. p9


Persondata
NAME Lack, David
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION British ornithologist and biologist
DATE OF BIRTH July 16, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH March 12, 1973
PLACE OF DEATH