G. Evelyn Hutchinson and the Invention of Modern Ecology

  • Nancy G. Slack
Yale University Press: 2011. 457 pp. $40, £25 9780300161380 | ISBN: 978-0-3001-6138-0

Foundations tend to be hidden. So it is with the ecologist Evelyn Hutchinson. Little known outside his field, his ideas shaped the discipline of ecology as it is today. In her exhaustive biography, ecologist and science historian Nancy Slack pays tribute to his contribution and, between the lines, shows why he remains in the shadows.

Hutchinson did not make great discoveries. Instead, he made a series of great suggestions, pioneering a variety of approaches to study how plants and animals interact with their environment and with each other, and, in turn, how these interactions affect the diversity and abundance of living things. In doing so, he helped to turn natural history into ecology, transforming a discipline whose practitioners described what they saw into one where they sought to explain it. Several of his ideas have blossomed into subfields that continue to occupy researchers.

Born in 1903 to a family of scientists, Hutchinson went to university in his home town of Cambridge, UK. He never earned a doctorate; after graduating he spent brief spells in Naples, Italy, where he studied octopus physiology with little success, and South Africa, where he began working on lakes. He then moved to Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where he spent 43 years on the faculty. Lake-dwelling insects, an enthusiasm since childhood, became his model system, which he used to devise and test ideas throughout his career. He completed the fourth and final volume of his classic A Treatise on Limnology (Wiley) just before his death in 1991.

Evelyn Hutchinson in his laboratory at Yale University in 1939. Credit: YALE UNIV. OFFICE OF PUBLIC INFO./MANUSCRIPTS AND ARCHIVES, YALE UNIV. LIB.

Hutchinson's ecological career can be split into two periods. From about 1930 until the 1950s, his work focused on how chemical and physical conditions affect living communities. He was among the first to use radioactive elements to trace the movement of nutrients through an ecosystem, and performed some of the first biogeochemical studies, writing a lengthy book on guano.

From the late 1950s on, his interests shifted to population and community ecology — or, as he put it in a famous lecture, “Why are there so many kinds of animals?” He highlighted the conundrum that competing species coexist. If you make them live in close proximity in experimental conditions, he noted, only one will survive. Yet in the wild, many can live together even in apparently homogeneous environments, such as the plankton in lakes.

Hutchinson argued that species occupy different niches, dividing up their environment along axes of space, time, the availability of light, water or food, and so on. He pioneered mathematical approaches to these problems, analysing how species might exert forces on one another through competition for space and resources, or reach equilibrium. The two phases of his work seem very different, but are united by his attempt to find general explanations for structure and patterns in the living world by applying ideas and techniques from chemistry, physics and mathematics.

Hutchinson's approach was amateurish in the best sense, driven by joy and curiosity.

Hutchinson's appeal lies both in what he did and in the way he did it. His approach was amateurish in the best sense, driven by joy and curiosity. He was interested in everything, and published papers and books on illustration in medieval manuscripts and decoration in Asian art. He was a gifted writer, and his essays in American Scientist won him a broad following at the time; a collection of his writing has been reprinted in The Art of Ecology (Yale University Press, 2010). He was a brilliant teacher, and had a knack for attracting the brightest graduate students and helping them to realize their potential. He was as much the midwife of modern ecology as the parent.

Slack got to know Hutchinson in the last year of his life during a sabbatical at Yale. She has obviously read every available document and interviewed every relevant person willing to talk. Her biography is scholarly and a labour of love. But it is less than the sum of its parts. Some of the details could have been sacrificed in favour of a more coherent narrative or strongly argued thesis — I didn't need to know, for example, how many pages of references A Treatise on Limnology contains. Everything Hutchinson did, everywhere he went and everyone he met seems to be here, but the book says little of what it meant. It is difficult to see the wood for the trees.

The picture of Hutchinson beyond his intellectual life is hazy. The letters and papers quoted reveal little of the inner man, and he seems not to have discussed personal matters with friends or family. This was not for a lack of anything to discuss. His life had its share of sorrow, including a divorce and two further wives who predeceased him. We hear little about Hutchinson's politics, even though he declined to accept the President's Medal of Science from the administration of Richard Nixon, and little about his faith, even though he was a churchgoer.

There is no hint of anger, bitterness, feuds or egotism, despite some brutal office politics. Yale's biology department turned its resources away from organismal biology in the 1960s towards molecules and cells, resulting in many of Hutchinson's former students being driven from their jobs. Even for someone of his generation, class, nationality, gender and profession, Hutchinson seems unusually reticent. With so little to work with in creating shades of character, Slack's book reads more like a tribute to the work than a portrait of the man.

The work however, deserves its tribute. Hutchinson's questions about ecological competition still provoke argument. There is disagreement on whether what we see in nature owes more to predictable forces such as niche differentiation, or if life is structured mainly by chance and history, and whether grand and general theories are applicable to ecology. Hutchinson's concepts are very much alive: they are part of the discipline's furniture.