Hutchinson, G(eorge) Evelyn

(b. 30 January 1903 in Cambridge, England; d. 17 May 1991 in London, England), ecologist and limnologist who pioneered the development of the scientific basis of ecology.

Hutchinson was born into academia, the son of Arthur Hutchinson, a professor of mineralogy at Cambridge University and the master of Pembroke College, and Evaline Demezy Shipley, a feminist writer and activist. He was first educated by his parents along with his younger brother and sister and was encouraged to pursue scientific studies by his father and his uncle, the Cambridge vice chancellor Sir Arthur Shipley, who was a zoologist, embryologist, and noted contributor to Cambridge Natural History. At about the age of five Hutchinson began gathering fish and insects from local waters for his own aquariums and became intrigued by the fact that different animals live in different waters. He attended St. Faith’s School in Cambridge from 1912 to 1917 and Gresham’s School in Holt, Norfolk, from 1917 to 1921. At age fifteen he published a paper about a swimming grasshopper in Entomologist’s Record and Journal of Variation (1918). Entering Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, in 1921, he received a B.A. degree in 1924 and a master’s degree in 1928, both in zoology.

In 1925 Hutchinson took a Rockefeller Fellowship to the Stazione Zoologica in Naples to study octopus endocrinology, but the work was unsuccessful. In 1926 he became a zoology lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, but after two years he was dismissed for “incompetence,” like all his predecessors, by the professor in charge. Publications later described the situation there as unstable. Hutchinson then began his first major work in limnology, the study of lakes and other freshwater bodies, researching the geology, chemistry, and biology of South Africa’s dry lakes with Grace Pickford, a Cambridge graduate who was in the country on a scientific fellowship. The couple married in 1928 and divorced five years later. They had no children.

Hutchinson moved to the United States in 1928 when he went to Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, as a zoology instructor. He got this position in an unusual manner when, after applying late for a fellowship, he was offered an instructorship instead. This position led to his illustrious forty-three-year career at Yale. Promoted to an assistant professor in 1931, an associate professor in 1941, and a full professor in 1945, he was named the Sterling Professor of Zoology in 1952. From 1947 to 1965 he was the director of graduate studies in zoology, and he retired as the Sterling Professor emeritus in 1971.

In his early years at Yale, Hutchinson published twenty-seven papers based on limnological work performed mostly in Africa. In 1932 he was named biologist for the Yale North India Expedition, which led to important publications on high altitude lakes and his first book, The Clear Mirror: A Pattern of Life in Goa and in Indian Tibet (1936). On the voyage home Hutchinson met his second wife, Margaret Seal, with whom he shared deep interests in art, music, and religion. Their 1933 marriage lasted until her death in 1983. They had no children.

Hutchinson returned to Yale in 1933 and began the stream of research, writing, and teaching that continued to almost the end of his life. Constructing a bold, theoretical approach to ecology, he helped transform it from a descriptive, classificatory, and intuitive endeavor into a formal science of hypothesis testing and mathematical methods. He taught his students to consider all of the processes that exist in ecological systems and brought together diverse scientists and mathematicians to try to answer ecological questions. Besides limnology, Hutchinson’s enormous range of interests led him to contribute to several other fields, including biogeochemistry, radioecology, Paleoecology, systems ecology, and population ecology. Before 1947 he taught about the relation between carbon dioxide and Earth’s temperature and the expectation of global warming, a concept that was not discussed much by scientists before the late 1960s. One of his best-known contributions was his quantitatively oriented conception of the ecological niche, first discussed in a 1957 paper entitled “Concluding Remarks” in Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology. His multileveled approach became known as the “Hutchinson research school” and inspired generations of students, many of whom became leading ecologists and teachers themselves.

A gifted writer, Hutchinson authored nine books, nearly 150 articles, and many opinion columns over almost six decades. His four-volume A Treatise on Limnology (1957–1993) revolutionized the subject with its breadth of coverage on the geography, physics, and chemistry of lakes (1957); biology and plankton (1967); botany (1975); and lake invertebrates, published posthumously (1993). His other books include three collections of essays, The Itinerant Ivory Tower (1953), The Enchanted Voyage and Other Studies (1962), and The Ecological Theater and the Evolutionary Play (1965); and a textbook, An Introduction to Population Ecology (1978). For many years he also wrote a regular, widely read column called “Marginalia” on broad issues of science and socicty for American Scientist. A 1947 column on the English author Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia (1941) led to their lifelong friendship. In 1957 Hutchinson published A Preliminary List of the Writings of Rebecca West, 1912–1951, a bibliography of West’s works, and he later curated a collection of her papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library.

Hutchinson’s scientific accomplishments brought him membership in many important societies, including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Linnean Society of London, and the Royal Entomological Society, and foreign membership in the Royal Society. His scientific awards included the Leidy Medal (1955); the Naumann Medal (1959); the Eminent Ecologist Award of the Ecological Society of America (1962); the Tyler Award, which is often referred to as the Nobel Prize for conservation (1974); the Frederick Garner Cottrell Award (1974); the Franklin Medal, whose previous recipients included Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein (1979); the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal (1984), and Japan’s Kyoto Prize (1986). A naturalized American since 1941, he refused to accept the Medal of Science in 1973 in protest of President Richard Nixon but was awarded that medal posthumously in 1991. Although he never earned a Ph.D. in the traditional sense, he received honorary doctorates from Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cambridge University. At least twenty-two species have been named for him along with a lake in Ontario and a research laboratory at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Hutchinson spent his last years in failing health. In 1985 he married Anne Twitty Goldsby, a former biology teacher, who died in 1990. In 1991 he returned to England for a visit and died in London. His ashes were buried on 18 October 1991 at Christ Church in New Haven, Connecticut.

Considered a true polymath by many people, Hutchinson understood the complexity of environmental issues and with his students gave ecology an intellectual basis decades before most of the world was aware of environmental problems. He was a slim man, about five feet, ten inches tall; he was handsome when he was younger, but developed drooping eyes and rounded shoulders by his forties. A shy and deeply reserved man with a warm sense of humor, he was also a brilliant teacher who inspired students with his passion for science and his impeccable scholarship. One of the fathers of ecology, Hutchinson was also one of America’s foremost scientists.

The main collection of Hutchinson’s papers is in the Biology Collection of the Kline Science Library at Yale University. His papers related to Rebecca West, including her letters to him, are in the General Collection of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Beinecke Library, Yale University. Hutchinson’s letters to West are in the Special Collections Department of McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa, Oklahoma. His partial autobiography, The Kindly Fruits of the Earth: Recollections of an Embryo Ecologist (1979), traces his personal life and scientific development to 1930. A biographical essay with a partial bibliography is in Emily J. McMurray, ed., Notable Twentieth-Century Scientists (1995). Hutchinson’s “Concluding Remarks,” Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology 22 (1957): 415–427, was reprinted in Bulletin of Mathematical Biology 53 (1991): 193-213. Vivid articles that combine tribute, biography, and scientific analysis are L.B. Slobodkin, “George Evelyn Hutchinson: An Appreciation,” Journal of Animal Ecology 62, no. 2 (1993): 39–394; Ruth Patrick, “George Evelyn Hutchinson,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 138 (Dec. 1994): 529-535; and Lawrence B. Slobodkin and Nancy G. Slack, “George Evelyn Hutchinson: 20th-Century Ecologist,” Endeavour 23, no. 1 (1999): 24-30. A special issue of Limnology and Oceanography 16 (Mar. 1971): 167-477, dedicated to Hutchinson at his retirement includes a “phylogenetic tree of intellectual descendants,” a complete bibliography to 1971, photographs, and biographical material. Obituaries are in Time (3 June 1991), the Times (4 June 1991), London Independent (12 June 1991), and London Daily Telegraph (17 Aug. 1991).

Madeleine R. Nash