A personal reflection

As a post-doctoral fellow with Dick Lewontin at the University of Chicago for the academic year 1968–1969, I attended the inspiring Tuesday and Thursday morning class on population biology he jointly taught with Dick Levins. With 20 to 30 post-docs, students, and other visitors listening intently to these lectures, we were all sure that population biology was an approach that would be widely adopted over the coming years. The lectures of this class were mainly on theoretical topics and generally focused on population genetics and somewhat less on population ecology. After my post-doc year at Chicago, I went to the University of Kansas where an upper-level undergraduate course in population biology was being developed. There I taught population biology over the next 19 years and wrote a text for the course entitled Population Biology: the Evolution and Ecology of Populations (Hedrick 1984). The connection of evolution and ecology using introductory theoretical population biology principles and illustrative biological examples worked well teaching undergraduates. The introduction to population biology 35 years ago at the University of Chicago greatly influenced my approach to science and was an important factor resulting in my concentration on conservation biology research in the past decade.

Brief history of conservation biology

In the latter half of the twentieth century, it was widely recognized that the rate of species extinction was increasing and that many species were in imminent danger of extinction.