Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. This statement is an apt motto for the lifework of Theodosius Dobzhansky, whom Stephen Jay Gould has called "the greatest evolutionary geneticist of our times." Between 1937 and 1975, the year of his death, Dobzhansky and twenty-two of his collaborators published forty-three papers in a series called "The Genetics of Natural Populations." Taken as a whole, the series is perhaps the most important single corpus in modern evolutionary genetics. Dobzhansky's Genetics of Natural Populations, I-XLIII reproduces these forty-three articles. Because three of the four editor's of this volume are former students and long-time collaborators of Dobzhansky, they are able to set these important papers in critical perspective. The editors briefly evaluate the totality of Dobzhansky's work and summarize the views expressed in the series -- including the historic development of Dobzhansky's ideas on genetic variation. Cri
Theodosius Grygorovych Dobzhansky (Ukrainian: Теодо́сій Григо́рович Добжа́нський; Russian: Феодо́сий Григо́рьевич Добржа́нский) , Ph.D. (University of Leningrad, 1927; B.S., Biology, University of Kiev, 1921), was a prominent geneticist and evolutionary biologist, one of the central figures in modern evolutionary synthesis; his major work concerning the latter is "Genetics and the Origin of Species", published in 1937. He emigrated to the USA in 1927 on a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation.
Dobzhansky was the recipient of the National Medal of Science in 1964 and the Franklin Medal in 1973.