Robin Baker (biologist)
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Through Evolution, England and Navigation
Education and early life
Born in Wiltshire, England in 1944, Robin Baker grew up in the small village of Manningford Bruce in the Vale of Pewsey. Educated at Marlborough Royal Free Grammar School, where thirty years earlier the author William Golding had also been educated, he gained his Bachelor of Science degree in Zoology from the University of Bristol in 1965, followed by a PhD in 1969 supervised by H. E. Hinton. His thesis investigated the evolution of the migratory habit in butterflies and applied principles of behavioural ecology and evolutionary biology to the insect migration. This work was subsequently published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
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Career and research
Baker moved to the University of Newcastle in 1970 and from there to the University of Manchester in 1974 where he was first a lecturer, and in 1981 a Reader in Zoology in the School of Biological Sciences. In 1996 he left academic life to concentrate on his career in writing and broadcasting.
Although his early work was on evolutionary aspects of insect migration and territoriality, his interests broadened. With G.A. Parker and V.G.F. Smith in 1972, he proposed a theory for the evolution of anisogamy and two sexes and in 1979, with G.A. Parker he proposed the Unprofitable Prey Theory of the evolution of bird coloration. In 1978 in his book The Evolutionary Ecology of Animal Migration he wrote for the first time on the theme that permeated his work for the rest of his academic life: the application of the principles of evolutionary biology to the behaviour of humans. This led in the 1980s to controversial work on the role of magnetoreception in the navigation of humans, and in the 1990s (with Mark Bellis) to a study of sperm competition in humans and rats, including proposal of the kamikaze sperm hypothesis. Baker and Bellis' research into the evolutionary biology of infidelity, masturbation, sperm polymorphism, and sperm number in humans, as well as into the design and function of the human penis and cervix led to a number of scientific papers and an academic book: Human Sperm Competition: copulation, masturbation and infidelity.
Noticing that sperm in a mixed sample tends to clump together—making it less mobile—and to have a high mortality rate, reproductive biologist Robin Baker, formerly of the University of Manchester, proposed about a decade ago that some mammals, including humans, manufacture "killer" sperm whose only function is to attack foreign spermatozoa, destroying themselves in the process.
To test this idea, reproductive biologist Harry Moore and evolutionary ecologist Tim Birkhead of the University of Sheffield mixed sperm samples from 15 men in various combinations and checked for how the cells moved, clumped together, or developed abnormal shapes. "These are very simple experiments, but we tried to mimic what goes on in the reproductive tract," Moore says. The team found no excess casualties from any particular donor or other evidence of warring sperm, they report in 7 December Proceedings of the Royal Society. "The kamikaze sperm hypothesis is probably not a mechanism in human sperm competition," says Birkhead.
The findings are "the nail in the coffin for the kamikaze hypothesis," says Michael Bedford, a reproductive biologist at Cornell University's Weill Medical Center in New York City. He says he had never given the idea much credence.