Blackwell Reference Online

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Kinji Imanishi was an ecologist, anthropologist, and founder of primatology in Japan. His basic view emphasized cooperation rather than competition in the natural world. This view held that “lifestyle partitioning” ( sumiwake ) among coexisting species explained the origin, or differentiation, of species. His concept of “species society” ( specia ) likewise focused on members of a species as a whole and their interactions with one another that maintain an equilibrium, rather than on the morphological differences and reproductive fitness of individual members of the species. He returned to these views many times in the course of his critiques of the predominance of natural selection theory to explain evolution. Imanishi received a bachelor's degree in 1928 from Kyoto University, specializing in entomology. He then turned to the relatively new discipline of ecology for graduate research, excited by the prospect of studying living organisms interacting with their natural environment. He received a Doctor of Science degree in 1940 from Kyoto University based on nearly 10 years of research on the ecology and taxonomy of mayfly larvae of various genera living in Japanese river torrents. In the next year he published his first and perhaps best-known book, Seibutsu no Sekai ( The World of Living Things ). This was a philosophical statement of his views on the origins and interactions ... log in or subscribe to read full text