George Ledyard StebbinsBorn 6 Jan 1906; died 19 Jan 2000 at age 94.American geneticist who was one of the leading evolutionary biologists. Stebbins is considered one of the "architects" of the modern evolutionary synthesis of the 1930-40s (with Dobzhansky, animal systematist Ernst Mayr, and paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson ) Together, their work was a synthesis of research in cytology, genetics, systematics, paleontology. Stebbins created a modern framework for the study of plant evolution. From the 1940s, he artificially created fertile hybrids having more than twice the basic number of chromosomes (and was the first scientist to do so). This technique had value in both taxonomy and plant breeding. |
