Arthur James Cain FRS (25 July 1921 – 20 August 1999)[1] was a British evolutionary biologist and ecologist.
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.)
After leaving the military in November 1945, Cain returned to Oxford to pursue research in the Department of Zoology.
From January 1949 until 1964 Cain was employed as University Demonstrator in Animal Taxonomy.
[1][2][3] 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.
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.
With John Currey he made elegant use of sub-fossil material to follow changes in time as well as space.
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.
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.
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.
Cain laid the blame on their "vitalistic or perhaps theistic attitudes... Robson and Richards were far from alone.
[12][13] Ford understood the significance of pleiotropism, and knew of Fisher's demonstration that a neutral gene derived from a single mutation could only be in about the same number of individuals as there had been generations since its inception.
[14] Also, as Cain's own research showed, much polymorphism is maintained by differential selection in the diversity of environments within a species' range.
[15][16][17] (a full bibliography listing 148 items appears as supplementary material to Bryan Clarke's obituary[1]) Cain A.J.
Colour and banding morphs in subfossil samples of the snail Cepaea.
Area effects in Cepaea on the Larkhill Artillery Ranges, Salisbury Plain.
Ecogenetics of a population of Cepaea nemoralis subject to strong area effects.