Information about David Lack

David Lambert Lack (July 16, 1910 - March 12, 1973) was a British ornithologist and biologist.

Biography

Lack was born in London and educated at Gresham's School, Norfolk and Magdalene College, Cambridge where he studied Natural Sciences. He was a teacher until 1940, taking a year off to study bird behaviour on the Galapagos Islands. During World War Two he was involved in early work on radar observations of bird migration. In 1945 he became Director of the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology.

Lack's scientific research included work on population biology and density dependent regulation. He wrote a number of books, including The Life of the Robin (1943) and Swifts in a Tower (1956). His most famous work is Darwin's Finches, a landmark study that made Darwin's name synonymous with that Galapagos bird species. He also wrote numerous papers in ornithological journals, and had a knack of choosing memorable titles: he once claimed to have single-handedly caused the renaming of a group of birds through the submission of a scientific paper, his 1935 publication, "Territory and polygamy in a bishop bird, Euplectes hordeacea hordeacea (Linn.)" in the journal Ibis. Up to that point birds in the genus Euplectes had been referred to simply as bishops, but the journal editor felt that with that form the title might cause misunderstanding. Nonetheless Lack subsequently became a convert to Anglicanism, which led to his composition, in 1957, of a brief book, Evolutionary Theory and Christian Belief, on the relationship between Christian faith and evolutionary theory. This book foreshadows, in some ways, the non-overlapping magisteria conception of the relationship between religion and science later popularized by Stephen Jay Gould.

Publications

Books

• Lack, David. 1943. The Life of the Robin. H.F. & G. Witherby, London.
• Lack, David. 1947. Darwin's Finches. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (reissued in 1961 by Harper Bros., New York, with a new preface by Lack; reissued in 1983 by Cambridge University Press with an introduction and notes by Laurene M. Ratcliffe and Peter T. Boag). ISBN 0-521-25243-1
• Lack, David. 1950. Robin Redbreast. Oxford at the Clarendon Press.
• Lack, David. 1954. The Natural Regulation of Animal Numbers. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
• Lack, David. 1956. Swifts in a Tower. Methuen, London.
• Lack, David. 1957. Evolutionary Theory and Christian Belief: the unresolved conflict. Methuen, London.
• Lack, David. 1966. Population Studies of Birds. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
• Lack, David. 1971. Ecological Isolation in Birds. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
• Lack, David. 1976. Island Biology Illustrated by the Land Birds of Jamaica. University of California Press, Berkeley. ISBN 0-520-03007-9

Selected papers

• Lack, David. 1940. Evolution of the Galapagos finches. Nature 146:324-327.
• Lack, David. 1942. Ecological features of the bird faunas of British small islands. Journal of Animal Ecology 11:9-36.
• Lack, David. 1945. The Galapagos finches (Geospizinae): a study in variation. Occasional Papers of the California Academy of Sciences 21:i-vii, 1-152.
• Lack, David. 1973. The numbers of species of hummingbirds in the West Indies. Evolution 27:326-337.

References

• Obituary