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Replanting Ecology
Developed in large part by biologists at Yale, the study of how organisms interact with their environment went into steep decline within its parent department during the 1980s and 1990s. A restructuring plan is intended to reverse the trend.
Summer 2000
by Bruce Fellman

Since the first Earth Day celebration—on April 22, 1970—the concept of ecology has become an enduring part of American popular consciousness. Back then, the movement to save the planet may have seemed a bit flaky to some. But in the intervening decades, hard evidence about global warming, the extinction of animal species, and the wages of industrial pollution have made ecology mainstream. Yale can take pride in the fact that the scientific origins of that awareness owe much to work done in biology at the University during the first half of the last century. What is less celebrated, however, is the fact that the discipline was nearly overcome by subsequent internal bickering. Only now is the study of ecology at Yale regaining its former strength, and though its future is by no means certain, ecological fortunes are, at the moment, flourishing.

Two years ago, Yale created the department of ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB), and in the past year, the new department has hired two stellar senior researchers, University of Basel ecologist Stephen C. Stearns (see below) and Harvard botanist Michael Donoghue see (“What’s In a Name?” Apr.). The department’s scientists are engaged in investigating a wide variety of topics, among them the evolution of sexuality in snakes, how fins evolved into limbs, the reason marine invertebrates live in colonies, and the creation of a new way to catalog all life forms.

But there is an irony inherent in EEB’s current successes, for during the last three decades, ecology as a discipline had been on such a steep downward slide at the University that by the early 1990s, it had almost disappeared from the biology department’s intellectual landscape. Environmental concerns may have been dominating the headlines, but Yale biologists had a different agenda. They were more interested in unraveling the finer-grained secrets of molecules, cells, and genes.

They had plenty of company. At many universities—Harvard and Princeton among them—molecular biology, as this test-tube approach to life science is called, had become the dominant way of doing business. But the dominance of this view at Yale was so thorough that, according to Jeffrey Powell, an EEB researcher who has been a member of the biology faculty since the early 1970s, “the biology department was actually considered to be unfriendly to ecologists. People would come, last a few years, and leave. There was a feeling that they were not being treated well.”

The University was not happy about the near demise of a discipline whose central questions about the relationship between ecology and evolution were framed by G. Evelyn Hutchinson, a legendary scientist who taught at Yale from 1928 until his retirement in 1971. For one thing, says Provost Alison Richard, a professor of anthropology whose own research involves the ecology, behavior, and conservation of lemurs in Madagascar, the decline ran counter to a tradition that predated Hutchinson. “From the outset of the 19th century when Timothy Dwight dispatched Benjamin Silliman to Philadelphia and Edinburgh to be trained as Yale’s first professor of natural history and chemistry, Yale has played a leadership role in the study of the natural world,” says Richard. “Our concerns about meeting the challenges that go along with the stewardship of the planet are long and deep.”

To be sure, this kind of research was ongoing at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (FES), where ecologists such as Herbert Bormann and Eugene Likens were developing the landmark Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study, which for the past 35 years has been exploring the interactions among the plants, animals, geology, chemistry, and climate of a watershed in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. But despite efforts that Richard characterizes as “serious and made in good faith” to generate similar successes within the confines of the biology department, “ecology failed to thrive.”

A good part of the reason can be traced back to the Nobel Prize–winning research of James Watson and Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA in the early 1950s. Their work, and that of their followers since then, provided powerful tools with which investigators could explore and manipulate the molecules that lie at the heart of all life. This approach captured the popular imagination, a cadre of young researchers, and an inordinate share of grant money from funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

“At that time, the biological sciences were undergoing a massive expansion, but the resource base at Yale wasn’t expanding to match the excitement that was being generated,” says Richard. “In what was pretty much a zero-sum game, there was an unequal allocation of resources. This situation generated and fed tensions.”

The fact that molecular devotees were not shy about trumpeting the alleged superiority of their approach did not help matters. In his best-selling memoir Naturalist, Harvard ecologist Edward O. Wilson captured the prevailing mood in a chapter called “The Molecular Wars.” This was an account of the battles for departmental primacy that took place in Cambridge in the early 1960s between the more traditional biologists and what he describes as “a group of test-tube jockeys who could not tell a red-eyed vireo from a mole cricket.” James Watson, who joined the Harvard faculty in 1955, said bluntly that ecologists weren’t required in the new biological order. “Anyone who would hire an ecologist is out of his mind,” declared Watson in one committee meeting that Wilson describes. And George Wald, who received the Nobel Prize in 1967 for his research on the biochemistry of vision, had declared, “There is only one biology . and it is molecular biology.”

The result of what were clearly irreconcilable differences was a departmental split along molecular and ecological fault lines, but while Harvard’s intellectual partners were undergoing a bitter divorce in the late 1960s, Yale’s biologists were trying to effect an uneasy marriage. The botany and zoology departments, which historically had marked the fundamental divisions of biological science, had been united under one departmental roof in 1963, but the researchers at the Osborn Memorial Laboratories and the newly opened Kline Biology Tower were not immune to the molecular wave of thinking that was sweeping through the discipline. Adding to the uneasiness was a challenge issued to Yale’s ecologists by then-biology chairman Clement Markert, himself a molecular biologist. “Markert asked them to explain themselves and their work,” Jeffrey Powell recalls, “and the ecologists took this as an attack.”

Their reaction was not surprising, but, notes Alison Richard, the biology department “did not deliberately set out to do away with ecology.” That, however, was what almost happened.

Several times since the early 1970s, the University had brought in review committees of outside experts to come up with a remedy that would help ecology flourish. But while everyone involved came away agreeing that Yale had an intellectual—to say nothing of a societal—obligation to take a leadership role in this area, neither good intentions nor infusions of resources did the trick.

In 1995, Thomas Appelquist, then dean of the Graduate School, convened yet another committee to rethink the biology department, and after months of deliberation, the group came up with a controversial plan. The best way to spark an ecological renaissance, in the committee’s view, was to ask the department to undergo what biologists term a “mitosis,” a split into two parts—EEB, and the department of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology (MCDB).

This configuration, which was eventually accepted by the faculty and the Corporation, was received by some faculty with more resignation than joy. “There was considerable sentiment voiced for keeping the department together,” says Richard. “Biology, after all, is a whole, and I too am predisposed to the view that in science, integration is preferable to fragmentation. But the setup we had wasn’t working.”

Nor was there any credible evidence that the marriage could be saved. As one observer noted, “This couple had, after all, been in unsuccessful counseling for three decades.” There were numerous and deep scars, and there was also the matter of the department’s large size and scope—in its heyday, biology had some 40 professors.

“Breadth is admirable, but sometimes you can get too broad to be manageable,” says Richard. In fact, a study done by University of California researchers suggested that the ideal size of a department is in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 professors, and so, despite her philosophical misgivings, Richard championed the idea that the breakup was in everyone’s best interests. “It was a difficult decision, and history will be our judge,” she said.

The early returns have been quite positive. EEB, which is chaired by evolutionary biologist Gunter Wagner and is headquartered at the Osborn Memorial Laboratories, has achieved important successes in its recruiting efforts on both the senior and junior faculty level. Moreover, the department, which was assembled by joining together ecologically oriented researchers from the Forestry School with an already well-established group of evolutionary researchers, is attracting considerable interest among undergraduates. The new department, which graduated one major in 1999 and eight this year, has more than 20 in the pipeline for 2001. “We’ll probably level off at about 30 graduating seniors per year,” says Jeffrey Powell, EEB’s director of undergraduate studies.

That may be a far cry from that of MCDB, which graduates about 90 majors a year, most of whom are pre-meds. But FES ecologist David Skelly, who holds a joint appointment at EEB and is part of the Forestry School’s initiative, led by Dean Gustave Speth, to teach Yale College students, has no doubts about EEB’s enduring appeal to undergraduates. “This generation has grown up watching nature programs on the Discovery Channel,” says Skelly, “and it’s engrained with a conservation ethic. We can provide courses that meet the contemporary need to understand the way the natural world works and help preserve what they value.”

A survey course for non-majors called “Environmental Studies” that was taught this year by EEB associate professor Robert Dorit attracted nearly 300 students, and there are other courses in the works that should prove equally popular. The department is also pursuing an ambitious research program and investigating a wide array of problems, some at the most basic scientific levels and others with practical payoffs.

“Our major concern in EEB is how organisms live in populations and reflect the evolutionary process,” says Wagner, who is exploring how fins evolved into limbs. Marta Wells, an EEB lecturer who teaches courses in arthropod biology and animal behavior, investigates the ecology and evolution of the courtship songs of a group of insects known as lacewings. Oswald Schmitz, who has a joint appointment in the Forestry School and EEB, works on understanding how predators such as spiders affect the abundance of plants in a model ecosystem. He is using his findings to demonstrate how moose and deer might help in the management of pulpwood production in the Canadian forests.

Margaret Riley studies the evolutionary “arms race” that takes place among bacteria. In addition to addressing fundamental questions about the development of microbial diversity, Riley’s work has important applications in the development of food preservatives and new medicines. Skelly, meanwhile, examines the occurrence of frogs in northeastern Connecticut at the Yale-Myers Forest to develop methods of predicting large-scale distribution patterns of animals across entire landscapes. This research, he explains, will provide people charged with protecting the environment with ways of “being smarter about conserving species.”

But as EEB breaks out of the molecular shadow, its researchers are confronting another irony. “Even as we grow more separate, we’re using many of the same tools that molecular biologists developed,” says Powell.

Wagner and Riley rely on molecular techniques to determine the genetics of fish and bacteria. Michael Donoghue uses this methodology to determine interrelationships among species of both plants and fungi, as does Stephen Stearns, who made his mark investigating the ecology of life history strategies in plants and animals and is now teasing from the genes of fruit flies theories about why we grow old and die.

Jeffrey Powell and his wife, Gisella Caccone, an EEB lecturer and director of the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies’s laboratory for molecular systematics and conservation genetics laboratory, exemplify the way in which biology is becoming more, rather than less, unified. Powell, who professes an “an inordinate fondness for mosquitoes,” uses molecular methods to understand how the insects have developed the ability to transmit malaria. In her laboratory, Caccone trains researchers from a wide variety of disciplines in the techniques required to chart an organism’s history through an analysis of its DNA. She has worked with everyone from geneticists and paleontologists to taxonomists and art historians, and a recent collaboration involved using molecular methods to determine the kind of animal skin used in a painting (and thus, the painting’s authenticity).

Together, Powell and Caccone have tackled a knotty and poignant problem, one that shows how both kinds of biology complement each other. Several years ago, the two biologists served as the faculty hosts of a trip to the Galapagos Islands sponsored by the Association of Yale Alumni. There, in a pen filled with giant tortoises on Santa Cruz, the main island, they encountered “Lonesome George.” Despite the availability of numerous females in the enclosure, this tortoise stubbornly refused to mate.

George had come from Pinta, and he was the last of his line. At one time, each of the islands was populated by its own group of tortoises that were adapted to the particular living conditions there (Charles Darwin formulated the theory of evolution from his observations of animals, particular birds, in the Galapagos). It turned out that the large reptiles preferred to mate primarily with their own kind. There were no Pinta females in the Galapagos, so conservation officials asked the biologists if there was a tortoise—either on one of the islands or perhaps in a zoo—whose pedigree was close enough to George’s to convince him that she was acceptable.

“We told them that molecular genetics techniques could help,” says Caccone, who is analyzing blood from tortoises on the Galapagos and those that originally came from the islands and are now held in zoos. It is slow work, and George is still lonesome, or, at least, a bachelor. But there’s hope that he may one day find a suitable mate.

“Our research and methods are not the only techniques that conservationists need,” says Caccone. “But our tools can help people make important decisions about the management and preservation of species.”

This kind of inclusive attitude can serve as a bridge between the separated departments. “The pieces are certainly here,” says Richard, adding that the presence of a rejuvenated Peabody Museum is another key ingredient to EEB’s success. “All the great ecologists and evolutionary biologists have grown up in the shadows of natural history museums, so we have everything we need to help both departments move forward singly and, I am confident, together.”

The Hutchinson Connection

Among evolutionary ecologists, Stephen C. Stearns '67 is considered one of the giants of the field. The University of Basel scientist, who is best known for his work in the evolution of the life histories and life cycles of plants and animals, is also considered a good catch—the kind of senior researcher around whom a department can build a promising future.

Stearns, who will join the EEB faculty next year after having directed the Swiss university’s Institute of Ecology since 1983, is in addition a link to Yale’s ecological past. Many modern ecologists can trace their intellectual pedigree to G. Evelyn Hutchinson, the Yale researcher often credited with founding the discipline, and with Stearns, the University has restored the Hutchinson connection. “I got my master’s degree in 1971 at the University of Wisconsin where I was Stanley Dodson’s first graduate student. Dodson got his doctorate with Tommy Edmondson, who got his PhD with Hutchinson at Yale in 1942,” said Stearns.

Yale’s recent commitment to science and the EEB department, along with its international reach, intrigued Stearns, as did the better job prospects for his wife Beverly, a journalist with whom he wrote Watching, from the Edge of Extinctions, a critically acclaimed account of the efforts being made to save endangered species around the world. And while molecular biology had played a role in ecology’s decline at Yale, the proximity of molecular biologists was another factor that led Stearns to accept the University’s job offer. “Our work is increasingly complementary,” he explains.

Finally, there was the fact that Yale is in the business of preparing leaders in a wide variety of fields. “Through EEB,” says Stearns, “we can begin a program of preventive medicine for the environment.”

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