John Alcock Inspired a Generation

When I was a young assistant professor at Montana State University, nearly a half-century ago, one of the biologists on the faculty was teaching from a new textbook titled Animal Behavior: An Evolutionary Approach. I remember wondering at the time: “Doesn’t every biologist think about animal behavior from an evolutionary perspective?”

I later got to ask the author of that book, John Alcock. He explained to me that when he first wrote the book in the early 1970s, most biologists were more concerned with proximate mechanisms of animal behavior, such as hormones or stimuli in the immediate environment, and did not typically ask questions about what adaptive function might have been served by engaging in a particular behavior in a particular environment.

Alcock wrote the first edition of his book around the time that Nikolaas Tinbergen, Karl von Frisch, and Konrad Lorenz were awarded their joint Nobel Prize for work on animal social behavior. In the 48 years that followed the publication of Alcock’s book, there have been major advances in understanding the evolutionary function of various animal behaviors (including the behaviors of Homo sapiens, a topic Alcock addressed increasingly in later editions of the text).

Animal Behavior: An Evolutionary Approach, which went through nine more editions, inspired a whole generation of budding evolutionary theorists in biology and other fields, including psychology.

When I left Montana to join the faculty at Arizona State University, one of the students in my lab was raving about her undergraduate animal behavior class. It turned out that the teacher was John Alcock, who had moved to ASU in 1972. He was still a young fellow, having obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1969. At Harvard, he studied under the renowned evolutionary biologists Ernst Mayr and E.O. Wilson.

Alcock became interested in field biology long before that, though, after receiving a pair of binoculars from his parents at age seven. Through those binoculars, he discovered the beautiful birds of rural Pennsylvania, where he was raised.

I later had the pleasure of going birdwatching with Alcock on a number of occasions, and his ability to spot and identify bird species from a brief glimpse, or even just a small snatch of song, was amazing. His research focused not on birds, though, but on mating systems in insects, such as a wasp species in which the males frantically dig into the dirt to unearth females hatching below the surface.

Alcock discovered a new species of orchid in Western Australia, where he often spent his summers, and he authored a number of beautifully written books about fascinating relationships between plants and animals in the desert. His Sonoran Desert Spring, for example, is a delightful read, revealing a deep appreciation of all the amazing life forms that have adapted to life in the desert. Another of his books, In a Desert Garden: Love and Death Among the Insects, describes all the amazing aspects of nature that took place in his own garden. Alcock had a store of knowledge and a way with words that allowed him to spin a riveting story about something as otherwise uninspiring as a compost heap. And given the known psychological benefits of getting out in nature (see Go Take a Hike!), imagine figuring out how to have a career in which your job is to go out into the wilderness and look at flowers and birds.

Alcock recently passed away at age 80, but until the end, he could be found in his yard tending his lovely garden.

Alcock’s natural history books reveal the gentler side of his spirit, but he could be feisty and unyieldingly logical in discussing the destruction of the natural environment or academics who clung to simplistic misconceptions about an evolutionary perspective on behavior. The dialectical side of Alcock’s nature is revealed in his masterful book The Triumph of Sociobiology or any edition of his Animal Behavior.

If you want to appreciate natural life or simply enjoy a good read, pick up one of Alcock’s books, and spend an afternoon reading it, preferably outdoors with birds singing nearby.