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Arthur Cain
Arthur James Cain FRS (25 July 1921 – 20 August 1999) was a British evolutionary biologist and ecologist. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1989.
Arthur James Cain was born and grew up in Rugby in Warwickshire, England. In 1939 he was awarded a prestigious scholarship (Demyship) to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated with first class honors in Zoology in 1941. Entering the British army in December 1941, Cain was commissioned second lieutenant in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps (engineering) and was later transferred to the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (R.E.M.E.) on its formation. He was promoted to captain in 1942.
After leaving the military in November 1945, Cain returned to Oxford to pursue research in the Department of Zoology. He became a Departmental Demonstrator in October 1946, finishing his D. Phil. in 1948. From January 1949 until 1964 Cain was employed as University Demonstrator in Animal Taxonomy. In addition he was appointed Curator of the Zoological Collections at the Oxford University Museum in 1954, besides serving as Lecturer in Zoology at St Peter's College (1958–1961).
In 1964, Cain left Oxford to become professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, and he later (1968) was appointed Derby Professor of Zoology at the University of Liverpool. He received emeritus status at Liverpool upon his retirement in 1989.
Cain's main interests lay in evolutionary biology, ecological genetics, animal taxonomy and speciation.
Though he initially conducted research with John Baker on the histochemistry of lipids, his main work lay in the field developed by E.B. Ford, namely, ecological genetics. With P.M. Sheppard, Cain studied the ecological genetics of colour and banding polymorphisms in snails. Cain and Sheppard's work on Cepaea nemoralis, one of the first studies to demonstrate natural selection by predators acting on a colour polymorphism, is now regarded as a classic. It generated a long series of further studies by Cain, including the formal genetic analysis of the variation, the discovery of area effects and the analysis of climatic influences. With John Currey he made elegant use of sub-fossil material to follow changes in time as well as space. Later he turned to the study of variation in shell shape.
In population genetics he clarified the concept of adaptive value. He made important contributions to the theory and practice of taxonomy, the problems of homology, phyletic weighting and taxonomic importance, on the status of the genus, and on the relevance of natural selection to our understanding of variation between taxonomic categories.
Towards the end of his life Cain was persuaded to reminisce about the status of natural selection in pre-war Oxford and how it changed over the years of the modern evolutionary synthesis. The general attitude was sceptical of natural selection. Charles Elton, who led the emergence of ecology as a discipline, pointed out the Arctic fox polymorphism, which can be found in all three tundra biomes of the northern palaeoarctic. Arctic foxes (Alopex lagopus) are dimorphic: the common morph ('white') is white in winter and brownish-grey dorsally in summer; the other morph ('blue') is light brown/blue in winter and dark brown in summer. The two morphs interbreed freely. Despite the obvious advantage of white in avoiding predation, blue is actually the most frequent morph in Iceland. Elton also gave a number of other examples which he claimed could not be explained by natural selection.
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Arthur Cain
Arthur James Cain FRS (25 July 1921 – 20 August 1999) was a British evolutionary biologist and ecologist. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1989.
Arthur James Cain was born and grew up in Rugby in Warwickshire, England. In 1939 he was awarded a prestigious scholarship (Demyship) to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated with first class honors in Zoology in 1941. Entering the British army in December 1941, Cain was commissioned second lieutenant in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps (engineering) and was later transferred to the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (R.E.M.E.) on its formation. He was promoted to captain in 1942.
After leaving the military in November 1945, Cain returned to Oxford to pursue research in the Department of Zoology. He became a Departmental Demonstrator in October 1946, finishing his D. Phil. in 1948. From January 1949 until 1964 Cain was employed as University Demonstrator in Animal Taxonomy. In addition he was appointed Curator of the Zoological Collections at the Oxford University Museum in 1954, besides serving as Lecturer in Zoology at St Peter's College (1958–1961).
In 1964, Cain left Oxford to become professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, and he later (1968) was appointed Derby Professor of Zoology at the University of Liverpool. He received emeritus status at Liverpool upon his retirement in 1989.
Cain's main interests lay in evolutionary biology, ecological genetics, animal taxonomy and speciation.
Though he initially conducted research with John Baker on the histochemistry of lipids, his main work lay in the field developed by E.B. Ford, namely, ecological genetics. With P.M. Sheppard, Cain studied the ecological genetics of colour and banding polymorphisms in snails. Cain and Sheppard's work on Cepaea nemoralis, one of the first studies to demonstrate natural selection by predators acting on a colour polymorphism, is now regarded as a classic. It generated a long series of further studies by Cain, including the formal genetic analysis of the variation, the discovery of area effects and the analysis of climatic influences. With John Currey he made elegant use of sub-fossil material to follow changes in time as well as space. Later he turned to the study of variation in shell shape.
In population genetics he clarified the concept of adaptive value. He made important contributions to the theory and practice of taxonomy, the problems of homology, phyletic weighting and taxonomic importance, on the status of the genus, and on the relevance of natural selection to our understanding of variation between taxonomic categories.
Towards the end of his life Cain was persuaded to reminisce about the status of natural selection in pre-war Oxford and how it changed over the years of the modern evolutionary synthesis. The general attitude was sceptical of natural selection. Charles Elton, who led the emergence of ecology as a discipline, pointed out the Arctic fox polymorphism, which can be found in all three tundra biomes of the northern palaeoarctic. Arctic foxes (Alopex lagopus) are dimorphic: the common morph ('white') is white in winter and brownish-grey dorsally in summer; the other morph ('blue') is light brown/blue in winter and dark brown in summer. The two morphs interbreed freely. Despite the obvious advantage of white in avoiding predation, blue is actually the most frequent morph in Iceland. Elton also gave a number of other examples which he claimed could not be explained by natural selection.