Theodosius Dobzhansky

Theodosius Dobzhansky was born on 25 January 1900 in Nemirov, in what was then the Russian Empire and is now Ukraine, and died on 18 December 1975 in Davis, California. He studied and taught at the University of Kiev before emigrating to the United States in 1927 to work with the geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan. His 1937 book Genetics and the Origin of Species drew on his own field studies of genetic variation in wild populations of the fruit fly Drosophila pseudoobscura to argue that natural selection acts on the kind of variation Mendelian genetics describes, joining laboratory genetics to field naturalism for the first time in a single rigorous account; the book is widely regarded as the founding text of the Modern Synthesis. Dobzhansky later held professorships at Columbia, Rockefeller University from 1962 to 1971, and the University of California, Davis from 1971 until his death. He is remembered for the title of a 1973 essay, "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution."