Thursday, March 11, 1999
at 4:00 PM
Francis Scott Key Building, Room 1117

The paper attempts to chart the personal dynamic between the evolutionary geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky and the botanist, geneticist and evolutionist G. Ledyard Stebbins Jr. during the interval of time leading to the evolutionary synthesis. Specifically, it explores how Stebbins structured his understanding of plant evolution as manifested in his 1950 book titled Variation and Evolution in Plants, with Dobzhansky's 1937 Genetics and the Origin of Species. One of the central concerns of the paper is determining the precise nature of Dobzhansky's "charismatic influence" on biologists like Stebbins and whether or not this influence "swayed" Stebbins to formulating view of plant evolution that was consistent with animal evolution.

Betty Smocovitis received her Ph.D. in the field of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and in the Program for History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Cornell University in 1988. Her interests include the recent history of twentieth century evolutionary biology, botany, genetics and systematics in the US. She is the author of a book exploring the historical writing of the evolutionary synthesis, titled Unifying Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology.She has additionally explored the organizational aspects of twentieth century evolutionary biology, and has recently completed a history of the 1959 Darwin Centennial at the University of Chicago. She is presently working on an intellectual biography of G. Ledyard Stebbins Jr., the botanical "architect" of the evolutionary synthesis titled Botanist, Geneticist, and Evolutionist: The Scientific Life of G. Ledyard Stebbins, Jr. She has been with the Dept. History, University of Florida since 1988, but has also been a visitor at Stanford University, Cornell University, Emory University, and at the National Museum and Art Gallery in Papua New Guinea.

Spring 1999