Conducting Marine Science in the Arctic - The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger - page 214

The following morning, we made our way south down the full 230-kilometre length
of Frobisher Bay. The mysteriously named Meta Incognita Peninsula bounds this wide
inlet on its western flank. I had noticed on the chart that halfway down the peninsula was
Wynne-Edwards Bay. Vero Wynne-Edwards was my zoology professor at Aberdeen. He
was a keenly intelligent but very modest man. Despite his responsibilities as the head of
the department and chair of the UK's powerful Natural Environment Research Council, he
was often available to us students. Periodically, we would ask him to give us extracurricu-
lar lectures and I remember him showing an old lantern slide of himself on the deck of a
sailing boat somewhere in the Eastern Arctic.
Inthe1960sand1970s,hewasfascinatedbythewidespreadoccurrenceofbehaviours
in the animal kingdom that appeared to resemble altruism. He argued that animal popula-
tions with behaviours that prevented them from exhausting their resources would be more
likely to succeed in raising offspring for future generations than those lacking such beha-
viour. Natural selection would be operating on groups rather than on individuals. However,
this so-called “group selection” quickly ran into troubled waters. It was hard to show how
natural selection could operate on groups to promote apparently altruistic behaviour. Any
individual whose genes encouraged it to cheat and take more food would produce the most
numerous offspring. There it rested until William Hamilton introduced a theory of “kin se-
lection”, in which he pointed out that close relatives (kin) share many of the same genes.
Therefore, if you possess a gene that promotes an apparently altruistic behaviour, such be-
haviour may help transfer many of your genes into the next generation, even though this
has been achieved through the agency of your close kin rather than yourself. This type of
approach provided a way to explain the evolutionary advantages of altruism without taking
on board the problems associated with the theory of group selection. Robert Wright gives
an easily understood description of how it may work. More technical explanations for al-
truistic behaviour can be found in the topics by Richard Dawkins. (See the bibliography .)
Before the European colonialists arrived in North America, the indigenous peoples
had names for the local features of their landscape, but by the 1950s, few of them appeared
on the map. More recently, there has been a revival of the original names or of names