The Last Generation : The End of Survival?
Born in Johannesburg in 1940 and educated in South Africa, I studied zoology at the University of the Witwatersrand, and carried out fieldwork in South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. In 1962 I was appointed to a junior academic position at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where I obtained my PhD degree and taught zoology, as well as pursuing field research in many parts of Australia, with briefer research and conference visits to the USA, Venezuela and England. After a university career culminating in six years as Head of the Department of Zoology, I moved to Box Hill Institute in Melbourne in 1995, where I was coordinator of the training course for zookeepers, the Certificate in Zookeeping. During this time I also worked as a biological consultant and presented community education programs on zoology, animal behaviour and evolutionary biology.
As well as a long list of scientific and popular publications in zoology and evolutionary biology, I have published three general-readership books about environmental concerns and human biology: Pollution and Conservation in Australia (Lansdowne Press, 1973), The Last Generation (Fontana/Collins, 1975) and Gorillas in the Garden (Surrey Beatty, 1997).
Since retiring from paid employment at the end of 2000 my principal occupations have been consulting, editing, writing, and working to restore the ecological values of a block of degraded forest in country Victoria.
Like many biologists, I regard Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species as an expression of the greatest idea that anyone ever had. It naturally provided the conceptual framework underlying my research studies, but also became more and more influential in my thinking about life in general, about human behaviour and society and about our interaction with our environment. I ascribe this in part to the fact that I did not allow my formal academic role to monopolise my interests and energies; but I put additional time and energy into trying to build bridges between my academic discipline and the community beyond the university. So, for instance, I talked to biology classes in schools; I developed courses on evolution and animal behaviour for adult education classes; I also designed and presented training courses for volunteer zoo guides. I developed a particular interest in situations which involved close animal-human interactions: the work of zookeepers is one good example. Another is the training and employment of guide dogs for the blind, and I took my students out of the university and into such situations as part of their exposure to biology in the broad sense. From these experiences, as well as from my own research programs, I began to perceive, more and more clearly, the behavioural and biological commonalities between humans and non-humans, stemming from their shared basis: evolution by natural selection. If our understanding of animal biology is based on the theory of evolution (and no-one who has thought sensibly about it could doubt that it is) then our approach to human biology must surely follow the same path. This is not arguing that the human species is “just another animal”. It is arguing that the dimensions of human uniqueness (all species are unique!) should be defined and measured in evolutionary terms. My interest in bringing science to the community led to my being invited to write the first general-readership book explaining the causes and consequences of human-caused pollution in Australia in 1973. This project in turn resulted in my coming to recognise that the impulses which lead us to pollute, to over-exploit, to extract, to build and to destroy are to be understood as part of our evolutionary nature. A consequence of this realisation was my book The Last Generation, published in 1975. Long out of print, it is being made available again as a Gutenberg edition.
Like many biologists, I regard Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species as an expression of the greatest idea that anyone ever had. It naturally provided the conceptual framework underlying my research studies, but also became more and more influential in my thinking about life in general, about human behaviour and society and about our interaction with our environment. I ascribe this in part to the fact that I did not allow my formal academic role to monopolise my interests and energies; but I put additional time and energy into trying to build bridges between my academic discipline and the community beyond the university. So, for instance, I talked to biology classes in schools; I developed courses on evolution and animal behaviour for adult education classes; I also designed and presented training courses for volunteer zoo guides. I developed a particular interest in situations which involved close animal-human interactions: the work of zookeepers is one good example. Another is the training and employment of guide dogs for the blind, and I took my students out of the university and into such situations as part of their exposure to biology in the broad sense.
From these experiences, as well as from my own research programs, I began to perceive, more and more clearly, the behavioural and biological commonalities between humans and non-humans, stemming from their shared basis: evolution by natural selection. If our understanding of animal biology is based on the theory of evolution (and no-one who has thought sensibly about it could doubt that it is) then our approach to human biology must surely follow the same path. This is not arguing that the human species is “just another animal”. It is arguing that the dimensions of human uniqueness (all species are unique!) should be defined and measured in evolutionary terms.
My interest in bringing science to the community led to my being invited to write the first general-readership book explaining the causes and consequences of human-caused pollution in Australia in 1973. This project in turn resulted in my coming to recognise that the impulses which lead us to pollute, to over-exploit, to extract, to build and to destroy are to be understood as part of our evolutionary nature. A consequence of this realisation was my book The Last Generation, published in 1975. Long out of print, it is being made available again as a Gutenberg edition.
