E. B. Ford

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Edmund Brisco "Henry" Ford
Wadham College
AwardsDarwin Medal
Weldon Memorial Prize (1959)
Scientific career
FieldsEcological genetics
InstitutionsUniversity of Oxford

Edmund Brisco "Henry" Ford

FRCP[1] (23 April 1901 – 2 January 1988) was a British ecological geneticist. He was a leader among those British biologists who investigated the role of natural selection in nature. As a schoolboy Ford became interested in lepidoptera, the group of insects which includes butterflies and moths. He went on to study the genetics of natural populations, and invented the field of ecological genetics. Ford was awarded the Royal Society's Darwin Medal
in 1954. In the wider world his best known work is Butterflies (1945).

Education

Ford was born in Dalton-in-Furness, near Ulverston, in Lancashire, England, in 1901. He was the only child of Harold Dodsworth Ford (1864–1943), a classics teacher turned Anglican clergyman, and his wife (and second cousin) Gertrude Emma Bennett.[2] His paternal grandfather, Dr Henry Edmund Ford (1821–1909), was a professor of music at Carlisle[3][4] and the organist of Carlisle Cathedral from 1842 to 1902.[5][6][7] Ford was educated at St Bees School, Cumberland (now Cumbria), and read zoology at Wadham College, Oxford, (where his father had also studied),[8] graduating B.A. in 1924, upgraded to M.A. 1927, B.Sc. (a research degree) in 1927, and taking a D.Sc in 1943.[9]

Career and research

Ford's career was based entirely at the

Pasteur, both of whom he knew."[11]

Ford was appointed University Demonstrator in Zoology in 1927 and Lecturer at

All Souls College
since the seventeenth century.

Ford had a long working relationship with

blood groups as an example). Like Fisher, he continued the natural selection versus genetic drift debate with Sewall Wright, whom Ford believed put too much emphasis on genetic drift. It was as a result of Ford's work, as well as his own, that Dobzhansky changed the emphasis in the third edition of his famous text from drift to selection.[14]

Callimorpha dominula morpha typica with spread wings. Polymorphism in this species was investigated by Ford for many years.
The red with black rear wings, revealed in flight, warn of its noxious taste. The front wings are cryptic, covering the rear wings at rest. Here the moth, on a human hand, is resting but alert, and has jinked the front wings forward to reveal the warning flash.

Ford was an experimental naturalist who wanted to test evolution in nature. He virtually invented the field of research known as

genetic polymorphism, and predicted that human blood group polymorphisms might be maintained in the population by providing some protection against disease.[15] Six years after this prediction it was found to be so,[16] and furthermore, heterozygous advantage was decisively established by a study of AB x AB crosses.[17] His magnum opus was Ecological Genetics, which ran to four editions and was widely influential.[18]
He laid much of the groundwork for subsequent studies in this field, and was invited as a consultant to help set up similar research groups in several other countries.

Amongst Ford's many publications, perhaps the most popularly successful was the first book in the New Naturalist series, Butterflies.[19] Ford also went on in 1955 to write Moths[20] in the same series, one of only a few to have authored more than one book in the series.

Ford became Professor, and then Emeritus Professor of Ecological Genetics,

Wadham College. He was elected FRS in 1946, and awarded the Darwin Medal
in 1954.

Ecological genetics

E.B. Ford worked for many years on

homozygote. That is a typical genetic mechanism for causing this type of polymorphism. The work involves a synthesis of field observations, taxonomy, and laboratory genetics.[18][21]

Melanism in the peppered moth

Further information: Peppered moth evolution
Biston betularia f. typica is the white-bodied form of the peppered moth.
Biston betularia f. carbonaria is the black-bodied form of the peppered moth.

Ford was the supervisor of

Biston betularia
.

The entomologist Michael Majerus discussed criticisms that had been made of Kettlewell's experimental methods in his 1998 book Melanism: Evolution in Action.[22] This book was misrepresented in reviews, and the story was picked up by creationist campaigners. In her controversial book Of Moths and Men, Judith Hooper (2002) gave a critical account of Ford's supervision and relationship with Kettlewell, and implied that the work was fraudulent or at least incompetent. Careful studies of Kettlewell's surviving papers by Rudge (2005) and Young (2004) found Hooper's suggestion of fraud to be unjustified, and that "Hooper does not provide one shred of evidence to support this serious allegation".[23][24] Majerus himself described Of Moths and Men as "littered with errors, misrepresentations, misinterpretations and falsehoods". He concludes

"If you wade through the 200+ papers written about melanism in the peppered moth, it is difficult to come to any conclusion other than that natural selection through the agent of differential bird predation is largely responsible for the rise and fall of carbonaria".[22]

Kettlewell and

Lamarckian evolution, and was of the opinion that some genetic mechanism other than bird predation was at work.[27][28]

Bibliography

Works by Ford

  • Ford E.B. (1931, 8th ed 1965). Mendelism and evolution. Methuen, London.
  • Carpenter, G.D. Hale
    and E.B. Ford (1933) Mimicry. Methuen, London.
  • Ford E.B. (1938, 2nd ed 1950). The study of heredity. Butterworth, London. 2nd edn: Oxford University Press.
  • Ford E.B. (1940). Polymorphism and taxonomy. In Huxley J. The new systematics. Oxford.
  • Ford E.B. (1942, 7th edn 1973). Genetics for medical students Chapman and Hall, London.
  • Ford E.B. (1945, 3rd edn 1977). Butterflies. New Naturalist No. 1 Collins, London.
  • Ford E.B. (1951). British butterflies. Penguin Books, London.
  • Ford E.B. (1954, 3rd edn 1972). Moths. New Naturalist No. 30 Collins, London.
  • Ford E.B. (1964, 4th edn 1975). Ecological genetics. Chapman and Hall, London.
  • Ford E.B. (1965). Genetic polymorphism. All Souls Studies, Faber & Faber, London.
  • Ford E.B. (1976). Genetics and adaptation. Institute of Biology studies, Edward Arnold, London.
  • Ford E.B. (1979). Understanding genetics. Faber and Faber, London.
  • Ford E.B. (1980). Some recollections pertaining to the evolutionary synthesis. In
    Provine W.B.
    (eds) The evolutionary synthesis: perspectives on the unification of biology. Harvard 1980; 1998. [effectively, this is an intellectual autobiography]
  • Ford E.B. (1981). Taking genetics into the countryside. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London.
  • Ford E.B. and J.S. Haywood (1984). Church treasures of the Oxford district. Alan Sutton, Gloucester.

Personal life

Ford never married, had no children, and was considered decidedly eccentric, although his eccentricity was said to be more prominent when he knew he had an audience; he was also fond of slightly surrealist practical joking.[29] He could be markedly generous to his friends: it was "an open secret" that he made a handsome contribution to the grant of £350000 given by the Nuffield Foundation for the establishment of a Unit of Medical Genetics at the University of Liverpool; this greatly boosted the research of Cyril Clarke and Philip Sheppard.[30]

Professor Ford would come into first year biology lectures at Oxford University – which were quite large, with about 150 students, and address the mixed group “good morning gentlemen”, ignoring the ladies, who even at that time were maybe 30% of student numbers – they are now 48%. The students thought that was amusing, and decided that, for one lecture in 1965, no men would attend. So he walked in to the lecture theatre with about 50 women sitting there waiting attentively, but no men. He put his notes on the lectern and looked up. “Oh dear, nobody here today I see, might as well go home”! Picked up his notes and walked out. (This story is also told of

Arthur Quiller Couch
, and has to be treated as apocryphal)(It is not apocryphal - it is confirmed by a number of first year Agriculture undergraduates who participated in the activity).

Non-academic information on his life is hard to come by, mostly consisting of scattered remarks made by colleagues. He campaigned strenuously against the admission of female Fellows to

male homosexuality in Britain. Ford was on good terms with Theodosius Dobzhansky, who did ground-breaking work on ecological genetics with Drosophila
species: they exchanged letters and visits.

Ford has a memoir written by Bryan Clarke published in the Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society,[1] but there are few other sources on his life.[31]

References

  1. ^
    S2CID 72984345
    .
  2. ^ "Edmund Briscoe Ford | RCP Museum".
  3. ^ Musical Opinion and Music Trade Review, vol. 33, 1909, p. 189
  4. ^ A Directory and Local Guide or Hand Book to Carlisle and Immediate Vicinity, Hudson Scott, 1858, p. 22
  5. ^ The Musician, vol. 15, Hatch Music Co., 1915, p. 133
  6. ^ Cathedral Organists Past and Present, John Ebenezer West, Novello, 1921, p. 15
  7. ^ The Succession of Organists of the Chapel Royal and the Cathedrals of England and Wales from C. 1538: Also of the Organists of the Collegiate Churches of Westminster and Windsor, Certain Academic Choral Foundations, and the Cathedrals of Armagh and Dublin, Watkins Shaw, Clarendon Press, 1991, p. 57
  8. ^ Alumni Oxonienses, 1715-1886, Later Series, E-K, Joseph Foster, Parker & Co., p. 476
  9. ^ The Annual Obituary 1988, ed. Patricia Burgess, St James Press, 1988, p. 14
  10. Provine W.B. 1992. In Berry R.J.
    et al. (eds) Genes in ecology. Blackwell, Oxford.
  11. ^ Ford E.B. 1980. Some recollections pertaining to the evolutionary synthesis. In Mayr E. and Provine W.B. (eds) The evolutionary synthesis: perspectives on the unification of biology. Harvard 1980; 2nd ed 1998, p336-8. [effectively, this is an intellectual autobiography]
  12. ^ Papers co-written with R.A. Fisher are available on the University of Adelaide's website at "The R.A. Fisher Digital Archive". Archived from the original on 13 December 2005. Retrieved 9 September 2007.
  13. ^ a b Ford E.B. 1940. Polymorphism and taxonomy. In Huxley J. The new systematics. Oxford.
  14. ^ Dobzhansky T. 1951. Genetics and the Origin of Species. 3rd ed, Columbia University Press N.Y.
  15. ^ Ford E.B. 1942. Genetics for medical students. Methuen, London.
  16. S2CID 221532346
    .
  17. PMID 13693519
    .
  18. ^ a b Ford E.B. 1964, 4th edn 1975. Ecological genetics. Chapman and Hall, London.
  19. ^ Ford E.B. 1945, 3rd ed 1977. Butterflies. New Naturalist No. 1 Collins, London.
  20. ^ Ford E.B. 1955, 3rd edn 1972. Moths. New Naturalist No. 30 HarperCollins, London.
  21. doi:10.1038/hdy.1955.1
    .
  22. ^ a b Majerus M.E.N. 2004. The Peppered moth: decline of a Darwinian disciple. Archived 24 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine (.doc download)
  23. S2CID 25525719
    .
  24. ^ Young M. 2003. Moonshine: why the peppered moth remains an icon of evolution.
  25. ^ Hooper, p. 42
  26. ^ Laurence M. Cook and John R.G. Turner, "Fifty percent and all that: what Haldane actually said," Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, https://academic.oup.com/biolinnean/issue/129/3 2020, 129, 765–771.
  27. ^ "Preface," in Heather and Gary Botting,The Orwellian World of Jehovah's Witnesses (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984
  28. ^ Tihemme Gagnon, "Introduction," Streaking! The Collected Poems of Gary Botting (Miami: Strategic, 2013
  29. ^ see for instance the "stone coffin" stunt reported from independent sources in Hooper (page 80) and Clarke (page 168)
  30. ^ Obituary Professor E.B. Ford--Theory and practice in genetics. The Times January 23, 1988
  31. ^ Marren P. 1995. The New Naturalists. HarperCollins, London.
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