A Festschrift for Chris Humphries FLS was held in the Linnean Society rooms on 1-3 October. The general idea was to encourage discussion on cladistics and botany with some reference to the work of Chris Humphries. These subjects – cladistics and botany – were the primary focus of Chris’s long career at the Natural History Museum in London. The general theme – ‘Beyond Cladistics’ – was tackled with some vigour, in spite of its meaning becoming more obscure as the days passed.
The event attracted three sponsors, in addition to the Linnean Society: the Systematics Association, the Natural History Museum and the International Institute for Species Exploration all got behind the event in one way or another.
Chris has had a long association with the Linnean Society, receiving the Bicentenary Medal in 1980 and the Linnean Gold Medal in 2001. Chris’s career started when he joined the Botany department of the Natural History Museum (NHM) in 1972, as assistant curator, a PhD student direct from Professor Vernon Heywood’s botany group in Reading University. Chris was the first of Heywood’s students (with David Bramwell, a speaker at this event), beginning the invasion of what became known as the Reading Mafia. With the exception of three sabbaticals – two to the University of Melbourne during 1979–80 and 1986 and a six month stay at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 1994 – Chris worked in the NHM for 35 years.
Chris joined the Botany department to replace Alexsandr Melderis, then Head of the European Herbarium. At that time Flora Europea was coming to a conclusion and Chris was bought in to put that project to bed. Chris’s first task was to finish his PhD, which he did in 1973. This work was a fine example of a morphological study on Argyranthemum, commenting on their relationships and geography. The morphology was published in 1976 as a Museum monograph in their Bulletin series.
Chris became internationally known and respected for his botanical work but he also made a name for himself promoting and encouraging the use of Willi Hennig’s Phylogenetic Systematics, or Cladistics, as it later became known.
The beginning of botanical cladistics is difficult to pin down. Pteridologist Herb Wagner invented something similar, with his ground plan divergence. This was in the early 1950s through to the late 1960s. But with the exception of a couple of Scandanavian botanists (Koponen and Bremer, the latter also a speaker here), Chris provided one of the first Hennigian cladograms – if not the very first – to appear from a UK botanist, a diagram slipped into a multi-authored piece on “Chromosome banding and synthetic systematics in Anacyclus” (1977).
Thus, Cladistics and its development was a suitable topic for any Humphries Festschrift.
The event attracted an audience of 74, who were treated to 24 presentations from notable scientists, many of them contributors to the cladistic revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The subject matter extended beyond simple categories but apart from cladistics, botany and Chris Humphries, there were presentations on species concepts, homology, biological conservation, biogeography (of fishes and flowers), historical matters and a little on the presumed-dead-but-apparently-not subject of phenetics. Controversies were surprisingly few, jokes were many and performances were, on occasion, theatrical. I believe it is safe to say the event was enjoyable and, to a degree, educational – at the very least, Chris went away with a spring in his step.
Dave Williams FLS
Natural History Museum, London
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