Wynne-Edwards, Vero C.

Person

Wynne-Edwards, Vero C.

1906-1997

Vero Copner Wynne-Edwards (July 4,1906-January 5,1997) C.B.E., F.R.S., Regis Professor of Natural History, University of Aberdeen, 1946-1974 was a British ethnologist who's writings on group selection became the focus of often acrimonious debate among theorists in the 1960's and 1970's. He was born in England. In 1924, he went up to New College, Oxford where, in 1927, he took a first in Zoology studying under such men as Julian Huxley, E.S. Goodrich, E.B. Ford, John R. Baker and Charles Elton who became his tutor after Huxley left Oxford. In 1929 he received an invitation to go to McGill University in Montreal and so Wynne-Edwards emigrated to Canada. During his years at McGill, the flora of Canada and the arctic became a part of his interest. This interest led to election to the Royal Society of Canada, (1940). He transferred his interest in fishes to the freshwater fauna of the St. Lawrence and its tributaries. This resulted in a faunal survey for the Quebec Provincial Government, from the South West corner of the Province to the Gaspé peninsula which was still in progress when he left Canada. In 1937 he was the Canadian `official' on board the Gloucester schooner "Gertrude Thebauld" the "Bluenose's" great American racing rival when Commander Donald B. MacMillan took her on his cruise to Labrador and Southern Baffin Island that year. Among other things, he managed to make the most detailed sketch map of the mountainous south coast of Frobisher Bay that had been made to that time. When, in 1945, the first area survey maps of the region appeared a small bay was named after Wynne-Edwards. In 1946 Wynne-Edwards accepted the chair of Natural History at the University of Aberdeen and the family emigrated to Scotland. Wynne-Edwards held the Regius Chair of Natural History at Aberdeen University from 1946 until his retirement in 1974. In 1956 he initiated an important research project on the population ecology and behaviour of red grouse which was still active at his death. He established the Culterty Field Station as a centre for post-graduate training and research in ecology and was instrumental in re-housing his department in a new building in 1970. He also served as Vice-Principal of Aberdeen University between 1970 and 1974.

The book for which Wynne-Edwards will be most remembered is Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behaviour, (1962). It is the scholarly result of a lifelong consideration of the process of limiting animal numbers and became, probably the most controversial book of its kind in the nineteen sixties and seventies.

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• English