Previous Meetings

There has been a meeting each year in December or January since the 1960s. In honour of the the 50th meeting in Cambridge in 2017, John Turner wrote a history of the early meetings, which includes tales of ghosts, Dick Lewontin and Cepaea snails. You can read this at the bottom of this page.

Here are a few of the programmes of recent previous meetings available for download:

PopGroup	Date	Location	Programme
52	January 2019	Oxford	PGG52 Programme
51	January 2018	Bristol	PGG51 Programme
50	January 2017	Cambridge	PGG50 Programme
49	December 2015	Edinburgh	PGG49 Edinburgh Programme
48	January 2015	Sheffield	PGG48 Sheffield Programme
47	January 2014	Bath	PGG47 Bath Programme
46	December 2012	Glasgow	PGG46 Glasgow Programme
45	January 2012	Nottingham	PGG45 Nottingham Programme
44	January 2011	Hull	PGG44 Hull Programme
43	January 2010	Liverpool	PGG43 Liverpool Programme
42	December 2008	Cardiff	PGG42 Cardiff Programme
41	December 2007	Warwick	PGG41 Warwick Programme
40	January 2007	Manchester	PGG40 Manchester Programme
39	December 2005	Edinburgh
38	December 2004	Reading	PGG38 Reading Programme
37	December 2003	Sussex	PGG37 Sussex Programme
36	January 2003	Leicester
35	January 2002	Leeds
34	January 2001	Sheffield	PGG34 Sheffield Programme
33	January 2000	Exeter
32	January 1999	Cambridge
31	December 1997	Nottingham
30	December 1996	Edinburgh	PGG30 Edinburgh Programme
29	January 1996	Bangor
28	January 1995	Exeter
27	1993/4	Reading
26	January 1993	Cardiff
25	December 1991	Leiden
24	January 1991	Manchester
23	December 1989	Nottingham
22	January 1989	Leicester
21	January 1988	UCL, London
20	December 1986	Nottingham
19	December 1985	Exeter
18	January 1985	Manchester
17	January 1984	Southampton
16	January 1983	Birmingham	PGG16 Birmingham Programme
15	January 1982	Cambridge	PGG15 Cambridge Programme
14	December 1980	Edinburgh	PGG14 Edinburgh Programme
13	January 1980	Sussex	PGG13 Sussex Programme
12	1978/9	–
11	1977/8	–
10	1976/7	Southampton
9	December 1976	Durham
8	1975	Sussex
7	1974/5	Swansea?
6	1972/3	Nottingham
5	1971/2	Bangor
4	1970/1	London (UCL?)
3	1969/70	Liverpool
2	1968/9	Edinburgh
1	1968	Birmingham	PGG01 Birmingham Programme

Fifty glorious years of PGG: the first ten percent

Welcome to No Man’s Time: too recent for history, too early to be memory. The decade or so before you were born. For many of you this lost period will be the late 1960s, when the Population Genetics Group was just beginning. There are now not many people who can remember, and archived documentation is fragmentary. I have compiled this brief account from my own memories and diaries, from my wife Sandra’s diaries, and from the recollections of Laurence Cook, John Currey, Peter O’Donald and Mark Williamson (also Charlotte Williamson’s diaries). Darren Obbard has helped me from his accumulating archive.

The PGG originated in the burst of active research on Cepaea and related snails during the 1960s, and in a conference hosted by John Currey at the new and ambitious biology department at York. Most of the participants, including AJ Cain, BC Clarke, M Lamotte, H Wolda, LM Cook, CB Goodhart and many of Cain’s current and former graduate students, obviously were working directly with these species, but there was also a sprinkling of people with a wider interest who contributed by way of theory: J Antonovics, P O’Donald, JRG Turner and MH Williamson. Even plants were represented, by Tony Bradshaw (MW) and—as snail food—Philip Grime.

The York meeting was a great success, and was followed by two further specialised Cepaea meetings: in Paris 1971 hosted by Maxime Lamotte, and at Groningen hosted by Henk Wolda, date so far unknown (MW, LC). Meanwhile the opportunity to build on the widened field of interest at the York meeting was seized: a more general population genetics meeting was mooted for the next year. An extra motive was the frustration felt by many population geneticists at what they saw as the domination of Genetical Society meetings by work on intermediary fungal metabolism. My guess is that the prime mover was Bryan Clarke. The first meeting of PGG sensu stricto was therefore held in the following winter. Birmingham was selected chiefly because it was considered to approximate the least squared distance point from most of the workers in the field (tough luck Aberdeen).

After this the meeting became annual, around Christmas, but variably before or after the change of year (hence the 1970/71 etc designations: table 1, for the first five years plus the forerunner), and peripatetic, eventually by invitation from an appropriately interested department in the host university.

Table1. The first five PGG meetings, with the preceding Cepaea conference

Meeting no Season Date Place

0 1966/67 3-7 Jan 67 York

1 1967/68 10-11 Jan 68 Birmingham

2 1968/69 16-18 Dec 68 Edinburgh

3 1969/70 16-18 Dec 69 Liverpool

4 1970/71 16-18 Dec 70 London [?UCL]

5 1971/72 17-20 Dec 71 Bangor

This truly was “science from the People”. There was no formal organisation, no officers, no president; but then of course, no archives. The full lists of participants may be lost for ever. I have clear recollections of some people at Birmingham, although of course there may be some false memories transferred from other meetings; Mark Williamson and Laurence Cook have garnered some more. The combined, reasonably certain roster so far is Arthur Cain, John Maynard Smith, Alan Roberston, Wilhelm Scharloo, Kennedy McWhirter, Charles Goodhart, Robert Creed, Michael Kearsey, Geoff Oxford, John Jinks, John Thoday, Terry Crawford [-Sidebotham], and probably David Jones; and of course the informants themselves! Notable absences included a number of “big names” who probably still saw their natural milieu as the Royal Society and the Genetical Society: as far as I know Henry (EB) Ford, Philip Sheppard (even when the meeting was hosted in Liverpool), and Kenneth Mather never (well, hardly ever—there is some disagreement between observers) attended PGG. Arthur Cain, who never saw himself as a geneticist, became a stalwart, as did Maynard Smith, Alan Robertson and John Thoday.

The population size of the meetings was, by modern standards, modest. The delegates to the York Cepaea conference numbered only 24 [CW]. There was no call for parallel sessions: everybody could hear all the papers. No full programme for any of the meetings has yet been recovered, but the sessions for the Liverpool and London meetings were noted in my diary:

Table 2 The timetable of sessions for the Liverpool PGG meeting of 1969/70

1969 am pm

16 Dec Genetical architecture Genotype x environment

17 Dec Competing species Strong selection pressures

18 Dec Enzyme polymorphism Enzyme polymorphism

Table 3 The timetable of sessions for the London PGG meeting of 1970/71

1970 am pm

16 Dec [No session] Coadaptation

17 Dec Measurement of selection Chromosomes

18 Dec Congenital malformations Protein evolution

The subjects under discussion can be surmised from the history of population genetics for the period: see B Charlesworth & D Charlesworth Heredity advance online publication, 27 July 2016; doi:10.1038/hdy.2016.55 for the broad view; as usual with history it felt somewhat different when it was happening. Memories of a few of the delivered papers have been recovered. At Birmingham [LC] the scheduled plenary lecture by Ken-Ichi Kojima was prevented by atrocious winter weather in the northern Atlantic, and Alan Robertson stepped in and gave a seminal introduction on the subject of heterozygosity and genetic load, reviewing work by Sved, Reed & Bodmer, King and Milkman. Five years later in Bangor (LC, JT) the same controversies were still current: the PGG was privileged to hear from Dick Lewontin, who was at that time preparing his “book on enzyme polymorphism” (to appear in 1974 as The genetic basis of evolutionary change) on the broad directions and challenges for population genetics as he saw them, which were vastly at variance with the overall culture of Cepaea genetics that had founded the PGG. I recall him saying to Maynard Smith over lunch, that he found it hard to credit that all selection coefficients were large.

One further lecture at Birmingham remains firmly in my memory. Kennedy McWhirter was an unusually talented polymath: biologist, qualified barrister, linguist/translator, psychic (with the ability to communicate with ghosts); incidentally he was also the elder brother of the McWhirter (Guinness Book of Records) twins. He had worked with Ford on Maniola jurtina, and at this time held a research fellowship in Ford’s lab. His paper was on the theory of endocyclic selection, uniquely developed by Kennedy: he was suggesting that interesting results in the dynamics of polymorphism would arise if the direction of selection varied during the course of one life cycle (e.g. in favour of aa genotypes in juveniles, but against them in adults). The theory never came to adequate fruition and as far as I know was never published, but Kennedy gave a spirited presentation. For reasons that are now hard to recall, it was all extremely funny. This was unintended, but Kennedy took the laughter from the audience in somewhat puzzled good humour. It was not that we were laughing at him, or at his ideas: it was simply that the way he presented things had genuine comedy. By the end the whole lecture theatre was rocking, with the exception of Arthur Cain, who being more of a gentleman than the rest of us, was sitting with his handkerchief stuffed into his mouth, and turning bright pink.

My thanks to the other named informants and to Brian and Deborah Charlesworth. Corrections, further memories, “I was there…”, “That was me” etc will be very much welcomed [j.r.g.turner@leeds.ac.uk; darren.obbard@ed.ac.uk].