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A day with the graves of Wytham

by Chrishen Gomez

It was a Saturday, far too early to be awake following the events of the night before. Today however, was a Saturday of intent. I had set myself a mission on that misty morning, one that begrudgingly pulled me out of bed as I earnestly searched for the will to follow through, inevitably finding it in a glorious cup of coffee. I put on my most comfortable walking shoes, indulged in another coffee “to-go”, and set off from my residence in North Oxford for the long walk that Google maps estimated would take 55 minutes.

That Saturday, I found myself walking towards the ancient and famed Wytham Woods. Wytham’s fame and significance around the globe has much to do with its physical proximity to the very heart of Oxford University. Indeed, these ancient woods situated right to the East of Oxford city has been the natural refuge for the scores of luminaries, academics, students, politicians, and artisans who have at one point of their lives, called Oxford home. If these trees could talk, they would tell stories of the many poets, who sat under the shade of their canopy while crafting delicate prose like:

“Mid the waving Woods of Wytham, 
Now so far, so far from me,
Where the grand old beeches be,
And the deer-herds feeding by them:
‘Mid the mossy Woods of Wytham,
Oft I roam in memory”

                – Walter Cassels

Or, they would talk about the numerous scientists armed with tools of all sorts to measure, record, observe and annotate. One such scientist who dedicated his life studying a relatively small part of this woodland, then laid the framework for what would be the entire subject and study of ecology (Charles Elton). My mission that Saturday however, had nothing to do with the oak trees, the tits, badgers and muntjacs. As the title of this article has alluded to, I went to Wytham that day with the aim of finding the grave of a man who had quite recently become an academic hero of mine. Before I proceed, might I clarify that this is hardly a common activity of mine for a Saturday morning, or any day for that matter. These next few paragraphs I hope will help you understand why this grave in particular warranted an expedition.

William Donald Hamilton was the Royal Society Research Professor in the Department of Zoology at Oxford in 1980 where he remained until his untimely death in 2000. Hamilton rose to stardom in the world of evolutionary biology after laying the mathematical groundwork for ‘Darwin’s biggest problem’- altruism and “self-sacrifice” as witnessed evidently in eusocial insects and of course, humans. Hamilton’s explanation and responses were both elegant and surprisingly intuitive, so surprising that even he was confounded that his predecessors (Ronald Fisher) hadn’t addressed the problem in the first place. His theories led the conception of now ubiquitous concepts in evolutionary biology such as kin selection and inclusive fitness. Hamilton was very much a risk-taker. Providing the biological framework for what is considered the most noble of human virtues – to die for another- would invariably lead one to question the inherent nobility of any action at all. Like Darwin and E.O Wilson, Hamilton’s work has escaped the thin walls of biology and drastically influenced thinking in psychology, sociology and anthropology.

As an ecologist however, my fascination with Hamilton comes from his deep roots in natural history. Hamilton had a prolific understanding of the natural world and its complexities. In his paper on Geometry for the Selfish Herd, he was concerned with how herbivorous herds organised themselves in such a way that each individual tries to maximise the chance  of escaping a predator that appears at random. In another paper, he contemplated the relationship between the brightness of autumn colours, tree defences, and parasitic insects. Hamilton had the kind of mind that was able to see the “connectedness” of everything. The Hamiltonian “connectedness”  extended well beyond the realms of the biotic, as he applied an evolutionary heuristic to the abiotic lending to a seminal idea that clouds (abiotic) were built around marine algae and various common microbes (biotic) which acted as vehicles for local dispersal of the said microorganisms. In my opinion however, the text that captures Hamilton’s profound connected thinking, is best described in the letter he wrote on his preferred choice of burial:

“I will leave a sum in my last will for my body to be carried to Brazil and to these forests. It will be laid out in a manner secure against the possums and the vultures just as we make our chickens secure; and this great Coprophanaeus beetle will bury me. They will enter, will bury, will live on my flesh; and in the shape of their children and mine, I will escape death. No worm for me nor sordid fly, I will buzz in the dusk like a huge bumble bee. I will be many, buzz even as a swarm of motorbikes, be borne, body by flying body out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars, lofted under those beautiful and un-fused elytra which we will all hold over our backs. So finally I too will shine like a violet ground beetle under a stone.”

Finding peace, that in death, his body might completely unite itself with the very systems that might have sparked his initial fascination with life and biology. This text came across my desk at a timely period of my DPhil, as I was knee deep in computational analysis and statistics. Sifting through reams of data and spending days understanding the algorithmic differences between the many choices of analysis, forgetting completely that the data is only one part of the picture. Ecology functions in a system of connectedness, with co-variates too numerous and sophisticated for even the best of our models. Ecology is a science of approximations, and as we seek to apply this science to shaping policy, development and general perspectives of the world, this is my solemn reminder that there is much more to be known and that, things are likely far more connected than we can possibly ever imagine.

In the end, Hamilton didn’t get his dying wish of being buried in the Amazon, but instead was buried close to home, just outside the sublime woods of Wytham. In response, his wife, Luisa, offered a final exhortation to his memory;

“BILL.  Now your body is lying in the Wytham Woods, but from here you will reach again your beloved forests. You will live not only in a beetle, but in billions of spores of fungi and algae brought by the wind higher up into the troposphere, all of you will form the clouds and wandering across the oceans, will fall down and fly up again and again, till eventually a drop of rain will join you to the water of the flooded forest of the Amazon.” 

You see it again -connectedness. So well did this capture the essence of the man, that these words were inscribed into a bench by the tombstone at Wytham. My mission that day, was really a mission to remind myself why I’ve chosen to walk the path I have. That Luisa’s homage to her husband might connect me in some personal way to him. My day at Wytham ended with a clumsy walkabout random graveyards in the village, ominously inspecting names on every tombstone before I finally gave up and basked in the consolation of at least having done some kind of exercise for the day. While I never got to pay my respects to the man, his memory lives on in the ideas that float about in my discussions. Connectedness.

P.S – If by any chance this article is read by Bill’s long time colleagues from the Department of Zoology ie Richard Dawkins, Alan Grafen etc.. do get in touch so I can finally complete my quest.