Biographical Memoirs Volume 58 (1989) / Chapter Skim
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Robert Helmer MacArthur
Robert Helmer MacArthur
Pages 318-327
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From page 319... ...
MacArthur was the youngest son of John Wood MacArthur, a professor of genetics at the University of Toronto and Marlboro College in Vermont. After completing his unclergraduate education at the latter institution and taking a master's clegree in mathematics at Brown University, Robert MacArthur took a Ph.D.
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came the celebrated "broken-stick" mocle} of the relative abundance of bird species. Although the specific hypothesis of competition embodied in the broken-stick distribution has been ctisputed and the approach was later dismissed as obsolete by MacArthur himself, we should not overlook the real significance of this contribution, which dicl indeed appear to describe what happens in nature in some as yet imperfectly studied circumstances.
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very much in temperament anct philosophy, "that a mathematician was a maker of patterns of ideas, and that beauty ant! seriousness were the criteria by which his patterns shouIcl be judged." In conversation, MacArthur would say that the best science comes, to a great extent, from the creation of de novo ant!
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He was not a mathematician of the first classvery few scientists are, otherwise they would become pure mathematicians but he joined superior talent in that field with an extraordinary creative drive, decent ambition, and a love of the natural world, birds, and science, in that order. MacArthur and his coworkers analyzed the evolution of the demographic parameters, established the environmental correlates of bird (diversity, and formulated and partly solvecl the species packing problem.
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of conservation biology because of its relevance to the study of the extinction process and the planning of natural reserves. As time passed MacArthur spoke of himself increasingly as a biogeographer ant!
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Nat., 93:133-34. On the breeding distribution pattern of North American migrant birds.
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1964 Environmental factors affecting bird species diversity.
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The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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From page 327... ...
253-59. New York: Oxford University Press.
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