Population regulation and the life history studies of LaMont Cole

Transformative changes marked the growth of mid-twentieth century American ecology. This included redirection of the scholarly focus of the discipline, especially on the role evolutionary theory and "levels of selection", and increased visibility of ecologist as public figures in the environmental movement with special knowledge of how natural systems work. Cornell ecologist LaMont Cole is an important figure to examine both of these trends. Like many of his contemporaries, Cole was devoted to a perspective on natural selection operating at levels above the individual. However, because of his influential mathematical treatment of animal demography he has been historically subsumed into a group of scholars that views the events in the life course as adaptations to the maximization of individual fitness--life history theory. Cole's popular writings and lectures, which consumed his later career, extend his scholarly portrayal of natural populations as tending toward stable and homoeostatic equilibrium, with the goal of drawing contrasts with the deviance of rapid human population growth. In both regards, Cole serves as a topical and temporal extension of the well-documented and analyzed ecology of his mentors--Alfred Emerson, Thomas Park, and Warder Allee--in the University of Chicago Zoology Department.