‘I believe it to be impossible to breed genuine wild animal under artificial conditions as to stand in a bucket of water and pick oneself up’. Helen Spurway’s original and neglected work from 1952

The breeding of wild animals in captivity is managed to maintain genetic diversity. Everybody knows that from television programmes on zoos, even after stripping out the anthropomorphic claptrap of the populist commentary. But even with the best management there is a limit to the number of generations that small populations can be maintained without incurring the deleterious effects of inbreeding. And when it comes to reintroducing populations into the wild is the gene pool the same as that in the original wild population? In other words, has there been artificial selection, however unintentional, so is the captive population genuinely wild?

There have been many papers and books written on this aspect of conservation biology but none that I have seen give credit to the person who drew attention to the problem nearly 70 years ago.

Under the provocative title, Can wild animals be kept in captivity?, Helen Spurway questioned not whether wild animals can be kept in captivity from the technological point of view but whether they can be maintained wild genetically. The emphasis was thus on the word ‘wild’. She wrote:

I believe it to be impossible to breed genuine wild animal under artificial conditions as to stand in a bucket of water and pick oneself up.

She argued it was inevitable that artificial selection occurs at all stages of keeping wild animals in captivity and that everybody doing so was involved in a process of domestication:

We, who keep animals, either as amateur naturalists, curators of zoological gardens, or academic biologists, cannot help taking part in some domestications.

In her admittedly rambling article (sadly, a model of organisation compared with ones she wrote on her studies of newts), Helen Spurway, considered the genetic and environmental factors that take place in captive populations which in the end produce animals different from those in the wild.

In a nutshell, artificial selection can—and did—occur at just about every stage. Captured individuals may have been may weakest or slowest in a population. The first, or only, individuals to breed in captivity would have led to selection of those least affected by stress to pass on their genes. I could continue in the same vein but the message is clear.

Helen Spurway also pointed out that even the first breeding in captivity involve inbreeding (think Golden Hamster, with only one mother and litter forming the captive/domesticated population for decades) or a degree of outbreeding never encountered in the wild. Therefore, she argued, there is an inevitable domestication of wild animals in captivity with succeeding generations and we end up with a phenotype adapted to life in captivity rather than life in the wild.

Helen Spurway (1915-1978) was a geneticist, then working at University College London. She is best remembered as the second wife of J.B.S. Haldane who shared his marxist beliefs and admiration for Joseph Stalin. They left Britain to work in India in 1956. At the time she wrote the article she was working on genetic differences between populations of European newts and was keeping a number in captivity for breeding experiments. I have written a little about that work here.

Helen Spurway and JBS Haldane in Calcutta

But how did I get to know about Spurway’s article? In 1959, starting ‘A’ level zoology and botany, we were introduced to the Biology Library at school (where a number of us hung out for much of the day in the company of museum specimens and a human skull. The senior biology master James J Key looked towards a small pile of paperbacks and suggested we work our way through them. They were old issues of Penguin New Biology and the first one I picked up contained the article by Helen Spurway.

Penguin’s series, New Biology, was published from 1945 until 1960 in 31 volumes. It was aimed at VIth form pupils and first-year undergraduates. The ‘new’ before ‘biology’ indicated several trends, not simply the promotion of then new areas of discovery, like cell biology, over traditional descriptive pursuits such as comparative anatomy. The great, and supposedly new, emphasis was on the use of biology in human affairs. The ‘new’ in this instance represented the views of the large number of marxist and communist biologists in the British university system who were arguing that progress could only come be made by having a planned economy with planned and centrally-controlled science as part of that process. I cannot help but point out that the holders of such beliefs were horrified if anybody tried to tell them what research they should be doing. Some scientists are more equal than others.

The editors who founded and ran Penguin’s New Biology were the husband and wife team, Michael Abercrombie FRS (1912-1979), the famous cell biologist and experimental embryologist, and Minnie Louie Johnson (1909-1984). 

The history of Penguin’s New Biology is told by Sir Peter Medawar in his biographical memoir on Abercrombie for the Royal Society, which, incidentally, contains acidic observations on some of the academic zoologists of the day:

It was an important event for the Abercrombies when Lancelot Hogben succeeded Munro Fox as the Mason Professor of Zoology at Birmingham and appointed Michael [Abercrombie] Lecturer in Zoology. Hogben lived with the socio­logist Professor Sargant Florence in the top floor of whose house the Aber­crombies had a flat. Hogben and the Abercrombies became very thick and it was Hogben, a great popular educationalist (cp. Mathematics for the Million) who turned the Abercrombies’ thoughts to one of the most important enter­prises of their lives… 

Hogben arranged an introduction to Allen Lane of Penguin Books and the Abercrombies undertook to produce a series of volumes to be called New Biology, each one of which would contain a number of authoritative essays at a pretty high academic level—sixth form and university first year. Lane paid £75 for the first volume, a sum which the Abercrombies shared out among the contributors, characteristically leaving themselves out. The first volume was a great success and sold something like 100,000 copies—a great success by scholarly standards—but as the series continued to a total of 31 volumes the sales dwindled to 20 000. Eventually, then, the verdict of the market place brought the series to an end… 

New Biology had a profoundly stimulating effect upon sixth formers and first year undergraduates and probably played an important part in speeding up the recruitment into biology that caused it to take up its present position as the most deeply absorbing and rapidly moving of all the sciences today.

New Scientist on 31 March 1960 in covering the demise of New Biology concluded:

New Biology has died because it could not make a living. There is something disturbingly wrong with a culture that could allow this to happen.

There was also this cartoon:

Nowadays, Penguin’s New Biology has been largely forgotten, copies in university and school libraries thrown out along with other key volumes in the battle for shelf space. As well as crackingly good articles its pages contained some notable spats between famous savants of the day and started some controversies that ran through biology and its history for decades.

Medawar PB. 1980. Michael Abercrombie 14 August 1912—28 May 1979. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 26, 1-15

Spurway H. 1952. Can wild animals be kept in captivity? New Biology 13 (edited by M Abercrobie and ML Johnson), 11-30. London: Penguin

Spurway H. 1953. Genetics of specific and subspecific differences in European newts. Symposia of the Society for Experimental Biology 7, 200-237