Dobzhansky’s list of the most important books of the modern evolutionary synthesis

A short list with short discussion

I quoted Dobzhansky, in the foreword to Mayr’s Systematics and the Origin of Species, as stating that

A new and significant trend has become discernible in biology during the last decade. The excessive specialization which had prevailed in the recent past seems slowly to be giving way to a greater unity; a science of general biology appears to be emerging.

I then wrote that

The modern synthesis of the first half of the 20th century is today regarded as having unified previously disparate fields concerned with the study of evolution (albeit with notable dissidents (Houle, 2024; Lala et al., 2024; Svensson, 2023)). In the foreword quoted above, Dobzhansky, an architect of this synthesis, lamented the contemporary state of biology and celebrated the promise of the synthesis. As a geneticist, he contributed to the unification of Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics within the new field of “evolutionary genetics” (Smocovitis, 1992)

I’ve learned since then that in the preface to the 3^rd edition of Genetics and the Origin of Species (1951) Dobzhansky wrote that a lot happened since 1942 and he seemed confident that the “greater unity” had arrived. He mentioned ten books that accomplished this. The number ten doesn’t seem deliberate since he didn’t make a list, but I’ll give one here. I’m presenting this as a list of “modern evolutionary synthesis” books but this term doesn’t have a perfectly consistent definition. Dobzhansky seemed to think all these books brought their respective fields in line with contemporary evolutionary genetics. Basically, if we see the early part of the modern synthesis as the “unification of Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics” then the books Dobzhansky includes come after that period and are apparently responsible for bringing other fields into this unification. Presumably Dobzhansky’s own work falls within the earlier period in this framework.

I post this mainly because it’s interesting to see what contemporaries considered the important works or events of their time and how those accord or contrast with our view of their time. In this light the list includes many of the well-known Columbia Biological Series of books but also some that are probably less familiar today. He referred to some only by citation (i.e. Author, Year) so I used his bibliography to infer them. I’ll list them by the subjects he claims they brought under the fold:

• Systematics

  • Animal

    • Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942) by Ernst Mayr

  • Plant

    • Variation and Evolution in Plants (1950) by G. Ledyard Stebbins

• Palaeontology

  • Tempo and Mode in Evolution (1944) by G.G. Simpson

  • The Meaning of Evolution (1949) by G.G. Simpson

• Comparative and experimental morphology and embryology

  • Evolution Above the Species Level (1947) by Bernhard Rensch¹

  • The Factors of Evolution (1946) by I. I. Schmalhausen²

• Ecology and Natural History

  • The Modern Synthesis (1942) by Julian Huxley

  • Darwin’s Finches (1947) by David Lack

  • Principles of Animal Ecology (1949) by Allee, Emerson, Park, Park and Schmidt

• Cytology

  • Animal Cytology and Evolution (1945) by M. J. D. White

He notes specifically the contribution of Emerson to Principles of Animal Ecology, who wrote a chapter on “Ecology and Evolution”, so that seems to be the primary text Dobzhansky means instead of the whole book. He also noted that physiology and biochemistry did not seem integrated yet. Out of curiosity, I typed “Evolution” into Google Scholar, and restricted to works published inclusively from 1942-50. There is a 1944 work on Biochemical Evolution by Marcel Florkin³ that seems like a promising candidate for biochemistry. I skimmed it and, amongst other things, it attempts a “comparative biochemistry” of different taxa.

1. Rensch’s work was originally published in German and called Neuere Probleme der Abstammungslehre: die Transspezifische Evolution and Dobzhansky cited it under this title since the translation wasn’t out until 1959. For all translated works discussed here, I give the English titles but the date of the original work, not the translation, in the main article. This is a little incongruent but I think for my (presumably mostly) anglophone readers, this is the easiest way to get across what each book was basically about and when it was first put into the world.

2. Schmalhausen’s work was originally published in Russian as Faktory Evolyutsii and apparently translated into English by Isadore Dordick and then edited by Dobzhansky and republished in 1949. I actually had to edit the Wikipedia article on Schmalhausen while writing this post as it incorrectly attributed translation itself to Dobzhansky. Dobzhansky himself cited the English version with the 1949 date.

3. Florkin’s work was originally published in French as L’Évolution biochimique in 1944 and translated into English in 1949.