How the European Society for Evolutionary Biology and the Journal of Evolutionary Biology were founded

At the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) congress in Uppsala, Sweden, in August 2007, I was invited to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Society and the Society’s journal, the Journal of Evolutionary Biology (JEB), with a talk describing their origin. This Guest Editorial is based on that talk. The ESEB did not emerge from a vacuum. An informal group had started to meet annually in the early 1980s to discuss evolutionary biology, mostly from the perspective of population genetics. It consisted of Wim Scharloo, Gerdien de Jong and Arie van Noordwijk at Utrecht, Suresh Jayakar and Laura Zonta at Pavia, Bengt Olle Bengtsson at Lund, Volker Loeschke and Freddie Christiansen at Aarhus, Jürgen Jacobs at Munich, Klaus Wöhrmann at Tübingen, and many others. Before I moved to Europe they had invited me to give a talk at their 1982 meeting in the Bavarian Alps, and after I moved to Basel in 1983 I attended meetings in Padua (Italy) and Denmark. At those meetings the need for a journal and the difficulty in finding a publisher were often discussed, but not all were convinced that a society with regular meetings would be a good idea. When I emerged from the 1985 meeting in Denmark particularly struck by disagreements over strategy, a seed had been planted. In 1986, probably because I had edited a special edition for the Birkhäuser journal Experientia and was in the process of expanding it into a book (The Evolution of Sex and its Consequences), the head of Birkhäuser in Basel, Hanspeter Thur, came to my office and asked me to found a journal with a society to back it up. The offer was unexpected. It solved one problem (finding a publisher for a journal) while creating another (founding a society). My experience in Europe suggested that the need was real, but the decision was not easy, for it was clear that there were others who might feel slighted. After thinking long and hard, I decided to do it, hoping to minimize any offense my decision might cause but willing to accept any unavoidable costs to achieve the larger goal. To spread the word, I attended meetings on evolutionary topics in 1986 and 1987 in Budapest, Prague, Dijon, Montpellier and Nottingham. I encountered much support in Eastern Europe, where the Wall was not yet down and scientists were hungry for more contact with the West. In Western Europe I met with support from those with an international orientation and with resistance from those with a local orientation. The standards implied by internationalization appeared to threaten local heroes with comfortable positions. EU and anti-EU politics played a small but noticeable role. The British could and did waver between Europe and their Sceptered Isle (‘fog in the Channel, Europe cut-off’). The Americans thought they had done it already in St. Louis in 1946 when they founded the Society for the Study of Evolution. The Canadians (and others) disagreed. Some sceptics said they thought I was doing it simply for selfaggrandizement. While resistance gave reason to quit, much of the discussion indicated that a journal and a society were in fact badly needed to pull people together. To get a journal, we needed a society – that was Birkhäuser’s condition – and to found a society, we needed a meeting. Thus we not only needed to pull together an editorial board: we needed speakers and money to bring them; we needed legal status with a constitution and bylaws; and we needed consensus and support, which we received from the engagement and assistance of some of the members of that pre-existing group, especially Wim Scharloo. In the winter and spring of 1987 ⁄ 88 we worked hard on organizing, before e-mail and the Web, by letter and by telephone. There were some advantages to my position in Basel. Switzerland had long been famous as neutral, centrally located and harmless. Basel was an old university with a strong tradition, recognized throughout Europe. It was convenient to let a young American take the lead. He was not yet entangled in local history, and when he stumbled clumsily and blundered innocently, he fitted easily into European expectations and surprised no one. His language happened to be English, a language for publication to which almost everyone was already resigned. There was an exchange at the founding congress between some French and some Swedes on this issue, with the Poles supporting the Swedes with the argument that they had invested a lot in learning English and did not want to have to learn French on top of it. At that point, I seem to recall, Pierre-Henri Gouyon, who was a strong supporter of internationalizing evolutionary biology in France, helped things along avec un petit bon mot: ‘The international language of science is bad English’. A bit of humour at a critical junction can help a lot.