John Langdon Brooks

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John Langdon Brooks (1920-2000) was an American evolutionary biologist, ecologist and limnologist.

Contents

Brooks was born in 1920, probably in Hamden, Connecticut, his father was John Alexander Brooks and his mother was Grace Evelyn Langdon, he had a sister Helen and a brother Richard. [1]

Brooks attended Yale University, where he studied under the guidance of G. Evelyn Hutchinson. [2] [3] He remained at Yale, at the Osborn Zoological Laboratory, until 1969 where he worked on the ecology and evolution of freshwater biota. During this period he co-authored an article with Stanley Dodson entitled Predation, Body Size and Composition of Plankton which was published in Science in October 1965. This article discussed the effect of an introduced predator, the alewife, on the planktonic fauna of lakes in New England and has been widely cited. [4] He was the first editor of the journal Systematic Zoology , his tenure lasting from 1952 to 1957. [5]

Brooks joined the National Science Foundation in 1969 and in 1981 he became Director of the Division of Environmental Biology with responsibility for the programs of the Foundation on Ecology, Population Biology and Physiological Ecology, Ecosystem Studies, Systematic Biology, and Biological Research Resources. [4] Brooks was also interested in the history of the understanding of evolution and in 1981–82 he took a sabbatical from the NSF to write Just Before the Origin: Alfred Russel Wallace's Theory of Evolution which was published in 1984. In this book Brooks sets out Alfred Russel Wallace's development of his concepts on evolution using Wallace's essays written from 1848 to 1858 as well as inferences in both published and unpublished papers written by Wallace. A large part of the information used by Brooks in this book had not been accessible to authors before this. The closing chapters of the book recount the events leading up to 1 July 1858 when the paper co-authored by Wallace and Charles Darwin was read to the Linnean Society in London. [4] One aspect of this book which generated some controversy was Brooks' findings that Darwin may have plagiarized some of Wallace's work for On the Origin of Species , particularly the "principle of divergence", and this has not found support among other scholars in this field. [6] Brooks retired from the NSF in June 1989. [4] Brooks played an important in the development of the NSF's Long Term Ecological Research Program which studies the changes in ecosystems in a number of nature reserves over extended periods. [7]

Selected bibliography

The following is a selected bibliography of works authored or co-authored by Brooks: [8]

Legacy

A haplochromine cichlid endemic to Lake Malawi was named Otopharynx brooksi in his honor in 1989 by M.K. Oliver. [9]

Related Research Articles

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Alfred Russel Wallace was an English naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist and illustrator. He independently conceived the theory of evolution through natural selection; his 1858 paper on the subject was published that year alongside extracts from Charles Darwin's earlier writings on the topic. It spurred Darwin to set aside the "big species book" he was drafting and quickly write an abstract of it, which was published in 1859 as On the Origin of Species.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Biogeography</span> Study of distribution of species

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">G. Evelyn Hutchinson</span> British ecologist (1903–1991)

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Carla Cáceres is a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign known for her research in population, community and evolutionary ecology, focusing on the origins, maintenance, and functional significance of biodiversity within ecosystems. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Ecological Society of America, and the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography

Aaron M. Ellison is an American ecologist, photographer, sculptor, and writer. He retired in July 2021 after 20 years as the senior research fellow in ecology at Harvard University and as a Senior Ecologist at the Harvard Forest. He also served as deputy director of the Harvard Forest from 2018 to 2021. Until 2018, he also was an adjunct research professor at the University of Massachusetts in the Departments of Biology and Environmental Conservation. Ellison has both authored and co-authored numerous scientific papers, books, book reviews and software reviews. For more than 30 years, Ellison has studied food-web dynamics and community ecology of wetlands and forests; the evolutionary ecology of carnivorous plants; the responses of plants and ants to global climate change; application of Bayesian statistical inference to ecological research and environmental decision-making; and the critical reaction of Ecology to Modernism. In 2012 he was elected a fellow of the Ecological Society of America. He was the editor-in-chief of Ecological Monographs from 2008 to 2015, was a senior editor of Methods in Ecology and Evolution from 2018-2021, and since 2021 has been the executive editor of Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carolyn Burns</span> New Zealand zoologist and academic

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Meghan Duffy</span> American biologist

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Walles Thomas Edmondson, also known as "Tommy" amongst his peers, was a prominent professor of zoology at the University of Washington. Edmondson was also leading American limnoecologist and writer, whose research focused on the causation and effects of eutrophication by plankton and his early work on rotifer taxonomy from Hispaniola, the Himalayas and lakes across the United States.

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References

  1. "Obituary of Helen Beebe". Bell Tower Funeral Home. 2013. Retrieved 30 December 2018.
  2. Thomas E. Lovejoy (2011). "George Evelyn Hutchison 13 January 1903 — 17 May 1991 Elected for MemRS 1983". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 57: 167–177. doi: 10.1098/rsbm.2010.0016 .
  3. Frank N. Egerton (2016). "Part 57: Aspects of Limnology in America, 1930s to about 1990, Led by Hutchinson and Hasler". Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America. 97 (3): 228–282. doi: 10.1002/bes2.1242 .
  4. 1 2 3 4 Norma Fowler (1990). "On the retirement of John Langdon Brooks from the NSF". Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America. 71 (3): 164–165. JSTOR   20167202 . Retrieved 30 December 2018.
  5. Joe Cain (2004). "Launching the Society of Systematic Zoology". In David M. Williams; Peter L. Forey (eds.). Milestones in Systematics. Systematics Association Special Volumes. CRC Press. ISBN   978-0203643037.
  6. Iain McCalman (2009). Darwin's Armada: Four Voyagers to the Southern Oceans and Their Battle for the Theory of Evolution. Simon & Schuster. ISBN   978-1847377180.
  7. John J. Magnuson; Timothy K. Kratz; Barbara J. Benson, eds. (2006). Long-term Dynamics of Lakes in the Landscape: Long-term Ecological Research on North Temperate Lakes. Long-Term Ecological Research Network series. Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0195136906.
  8. "Search results for 'au:Brooks, John Langdon,'". WorldCat. Retrieved 30 December 2018.
  9. Christopher Scharpf & Kenneth J. Lazara (4 December 2018). "Order CICHLIFORMES: Family CICHLIDAE: Subfamily PSEUDOCRENILABRINAE (l-o)". The ETYFish Project Fish Name Etymology Database. Christopher Scharpf and Kenneth J. Lazara. Retrieved 30 December 2018.