Theodosius Dobzhansky

Theodosius Dobzhansky was a Ukrainian geneticist who came to Columbia in 1927 to work with Morgan’s fruit flies and stayed in America, and whose Genetics and the Origin of Species of 1937 joined Mendel’s genetics to Darwin’s natural selection and founded the modern synthesis in evolutionary biology. Later work on wild populations of Drosophila showed evolution happening in the field. An Orthodox Christian, he wrote that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, and argued that faith and science need not conflict. The Great Books set added him in 1990 as the biology of the century.