Arthur Cain

Arthur James Cain FRS (25 July 1921 – 20 August 1999) was a British evolutionary biologist and ecologist. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1989.

Arthur James Cain was awarded an open scholarship in 1939 (Demyship) to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated with first class honors in zoology in 1941. Entering the British Army in December 1941, Cain was commissioned Second Lieutenant in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps (engineering) and was later transferred to the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (R.E.M.E.) on its formation. He was promoted to Captain in 1942.

After leaving the military in November 1945 Cain returned to Oxford to pursue research in the Department of Zoology. He became a Departmental Demonstrator in October 1946, and received his M.A. in November 1947. From January 1949 until 1964 Cain was employed as University Demonstrator (now referred to as Lecturer) in Animal Taxonomy.

Cain's main interests lay in evolutionary biology, ecological genetics, animal taxonomy and speciation.

Though he conducted research with John Baker on the of lipids, his main work lay in the field developed by E.B. Ford, namely, ecological genetics. With P.M. Sheppard, Cain studied the ecological genetics of colour and banding polymorphisms in snails. Cain and Sheppard's work on Cepaea nemoralis, one of the first studies to demonstrate natural selection by predators acting on a colour polymorphism, is now regarded as a classic. It generated a long series of further studies by Cain, including the formal genetic analysis of the variation, the discovery of area effects and the analysis of climatic influences. With John Currey he made elegant use of sub-fossil material to follow changes in time as well as space. Later he turned to the study of variation in shell shape.

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