Robert Helmer MacArthur (April 7, 1930 – November 1, 1972) was an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
ecologistEcology is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the interactions between organisms and the interactions of these organisms with their environment....
who made a major impact on many areas of
communityCommunity ecology is a subdiscipline of ecology which studies the distribution, abundance, demography, and interactions between coexisting populations. Interactions between populations, determined by specific genotypic and phenotypic characteristics, is the primary focus of community...
and
population ecologyPopulation ecology is a major sub-field of ecology that deals with the dynamics of species populations and how these populations interact with the environment....
.
MacArthur received his Bachelor's degree from
Marlboro CollegeMarlboro College is a small, coeducational, alternative liberal-arts college in Marlboro, Vermont, USA.-History:Marlboro College was founded in 1946 by Walter Hendricks for returning World War II veterans on Potash Hill in Marlboro, Vermont. The school's operation was initially financed using money...
, a Master's degree in mathematics from
Brown UniversityBrown University is a private university located in Providence, Rhode Island, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III...
(1953). A student of
G. Evelyn HutchinsonGeorge Evelyn Hutchinson was an Anglo-American zoologist known for his studies of freshwater lakes and considered the father of American limnology....
, MacArthur earned his Ph.D. from
Yale UniversityYale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States. Yale has produced many notable alumni, including five...
in 1958; his thesis was on the division of
ecological nicheIn ecology, a niche is a term describing the relational position of a species or population in its ecosystem to each other; e.g. a dolphin could potentially be in another ecological niche from one that travels in a different school if the members of these schools utilize significantly different...
s among five warbler species in the conifer forests of New York.
Robert Helmer MacArthur (April 7, 1930 – November 1, 1972) was an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
ecologistEcology is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the interactions between organisms and the interactions of these organisms with their environment....
who made a major impact on many areas of
communityCommunity ecology is a subdiscipline of ecology which studies the distribution, abundance, demography, and interactions between coexisting populations. Interactions between populations, determined by specific genotypic and phenotypic characteristics, is the primary focus of community...
and
population ecologyPopulation ecology is a major sub-field of ecology that deals with the dynamics of species populations and how these populations interact with the environment....
.
MacArthur received his Bachelor's degree from
Marlboro CollegeMarlboro College is a small, coeducational, alternative liberal-arts college in Marlboro, Vermont, USA.-History:Marlboro College was founded in 1946 by Walter Hendricks for returning World War II veterans on Potash Hill in Marlboro, Vermont. The school's operation was initially financed using money...
, a Master's degree in mathematics from
Brown UniversityBrown University is a private university located in Providence, Rhode Island, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III...
(1953). A student of
G. Evelyn HutchinsonGeorge Evelyn Hutchinson was an Anglo-American zoologist known for his studies of freshwater lakes and considered the father of American limnology....
, MacArthur earned his Ph.D. from
Yale UniversityYale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States. Yale has produced many notable alumni, including five...
in 1958; his thesis was on the division of
ecological nicheIn ecology, a niche is a term describing the relational position of a species or population in its ecosystem to each other; e.g. a dolphin could potentially be in another ecological niche from one that travels in a different school if the members of these schools utilize significantly different...
s among five warbler species in the conifer forests of New York. He was a professor at the
University of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania is a private research university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and is one of several institutions that claims to have been the first university in America...
, 1958-65, and professor of biology at
Princeton UniversityPrinceton University a private university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League and is considered one of the Colonial Colleges....
, 1965-72. He played an important role in the development of niche partitioning, and with E.O. Wilson he co-authored
The Theory of Island BiogeographyThe Theory of Island Biogeography is a 1967 book by Edward O. Wilson and Robert MacArthur which laid the foundations for the study of island biogeography. An edition with a new preface by Edward O. Wilson was published in 2001 ....
, a work which changed the field of
biogeographyBiogeography is the study of the distribution of biodiversity over space and time. It aims to reveal where organisms live, and at what abundance....
, drove community ecology and led to the development of modern
landscape ecologyLandscape ecology is the science of studying and improving the relationship between spatial pattern and ecological processes on a multitude of landscape scales and organizational levels. As a highly interdisciplinary enterprise, landscape ecology integrates biophysical and analytical approaches...
. His emphasis on
hypothesis testingA statistical hypothesis test is a method of making statistical decisions using experimental data. In statistics, a result is called statistically significant if it is unlikely to have occurred by chance...
helped change ecology from a primarily descriptive field into an experimental field, and drove the development of
theoretical ecologyTheoretical ecology refers to several intellectual traditions. The tradition pursued in universities and scientific journals under the rubric of theoretical ecology addresses the equations and probability distributions that govern the demography and biogeography of species...
.
At Princeton, MacArthur served as the general editor of the series Monographs in Population Biology, and helped to found the journal
Theoretical Population Biology. He also wrote
Geographical Ecology: Patterns in the Distribution of Species (1972). He was elected to the
National Academy of SciencesThe National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine."The group holds a congressional charter under Title 36 of the United States Code....
in 1969. Robert MacArthur died of
renal cancerRenal cell carcinoma is a kidney cancer that originates in the lining of the proximal convoluted tubule, the very small tubes in the kidney that filter the blood and remove waste products. RCC is the most common type of kidney cancer in adults, responsible for approximately 80% of cases...
in 1972.
External links