Erick Peirson's review of Ted R. Anderson's The Life of David Lack: Father of Evolutionary Ecology was published in the March issue of the Quarterly Review of Biology. See the full review here (paywall).
David Lack (1910–1973) was a British ornithologist whose research on population biology was part of a broader set of attempts in mid-20th century to integrate neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory into explanations of the distribution and abundance of species. In The Life of David Lack, ecologist Ted R. Anderson asserts that Lack should be appreciated as the “father of evolutionary ecology,” pointing to his 1947 book Darwin's Finches and his 1947 paper titled “The Significance of Clutch-Size” as evidence for his claim. Central to both of those works was the idea that the demographic and reproductive characteristics of a species are best explained in terms of maximizing the reproductive fitness of individual organisms, and the idea that the mechanisms of this selective process can be studied through experimental manipulations in the field.