Arthur Cain

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Arthur James Cain FRS (1921–1999) was a British evolutionary biologist and ecologist who helped shape ecological genetics and the study of how species vary and adapt.

He was born in Rugby, Warwickshire, and won a Demyship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he earned first-class honours in Zoology in 1941. He served in the British Army during World War II, rising to the rank of captain before leaving the military in 1945.

Back at Oxford, Cain pursued research in zoology, earning his DPhil in 1948. He worked as a University Demonstrator in Animal Taxonomy from 1949 to 1964 and was the Curator of the Zoological Collections at the Oxford University Museum (1954). He also served as a Lecturer in Zoology at St Peter’s College (1958–1961).

In 1964 Cain moved to the University of Manchester as Professor of Zoology, and in 1968 he became the Derby Professor of Zoology at the University of Liverpool, where he remained until retirement in 1989, later becoming emeritus.

Cain’s main interests were evolutionary biology, ecological genetics, animal taxonomy, and speciation. He began with work on lipids but soon focused on ecological genetics, following the ideas of E.B. Ford. With P. M. Sheppard, he studied colour and banding polymorphisms in the land snail Cepaea nemoralis. Their work showed that natural selection by predators acts on snail colour morphs, a classic example now used to teach natural selection. They extended this work with genetic analyses, the study of area effects, and the influence of climate. He also used sub-fossil material with J. D. Currey to study changes over time and space, and he explored variation in shell shape. In population genetics he helped clarify adaptive value and made important contributions to taxonomy, including concepts of homology, phyletic weighting, and the role of natural selection in variation among taxonomic groups.

Cain published many influential papers on Cepaea and ecogenetics, and his research helped shape how scientists think about variation within species and how natural selection operates in nature. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1989.