Biographical Memoirs Volume 85 (2004) / Chapter Skim
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George Ledyard Stebbins
George Ledyard Stebbins
Pages 290-313
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From page 291... ...
In 1941 the eminent botanist Edgar Anderson had been invited to 291
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From page 292... ...
George Ledyard Stebbins, Jr., was born on January 6, 1906, named after his father, although he preferred to be called Ledyard and dropped the "junior" from his name after his father died. He wrote about his early years: My home background was upper middle class white protestant in New York and New England.
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From page 293... ...
until 1929, I spent summers regularly in Seal Harbor. Neither parent was a naturalist, biologist or academician, but both had amateur interests in Natural History.
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There he learned to ride horseback, explored the Santa Inez Mountains, and fell under the influence of the botanist Ralph Hoffmann, who taught him much about the plants and natural history of that beautiful region. In 1924 Ledyard enrolled at Harvard University, a choice dictated by family background, but also because his older brother Henry was enrolled there.
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From page 295... ...
He collected Antennaria easily in the nearby environs so that he could also study geographic variation in the genus; this work was satisfying, but he began to fall out with his graduate advisor. Jeffrey, who was frequently referred to as "the stormy petrel of botany," hated with a vengeance the work of the noted plant geneticist Karl Sax and others, which emerged from the school of genetics associated with Thomas Hunt Morgan.
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From page 296... ...
His dissertation was finally approved, thanks to judicious efforts by Ralph Wetmore and others, but it had been amended so many times to meet the demands of a squabbling committee that it bore numerous scissor and paste marks masking the "offending" passages. It still stands in the Harvard archives as a testament to the contentious Harvard personalities in the botany department of those times.
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From page 297... ...
He later described these years as unhappy ones, one reason being the heavy teaching load assigned to him, and the other being the emphasis the school placed on its athletic program over its academic mission. Despite the difficult environment, Ledyard found time for research, concentrating on cytogenetic studies of Paeonia.
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From page 298... ...
. In 1935 Professor Ernest Brown Babcock of the University of California, Berkeley, offered Stebbins a research position in connection with his investigations of the genus Crepis, which he accepted cheerfully.
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From page 299... ...
He chose the genus Crepis to be the plant equivalent of Drosophila, even though it was a weed and not an important crop plant, mostly because this genus with its diverse geographic variation patterns could be used to understand the genetic basis for evolutionary change, which could then form the basis for taxonomic studies (Babcock, 1920)
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From page 300... ...
Not only did it demonstrate in detail the complex interplay of apomixis, polyploidy, and hybridization in a geographic context but it also offered insights into species formation, polymorphy in apomictic forms, and knowledge of how all these complex processes could inform an accurate phylogenetic history of the genus. Stebbins extended these ideas further in articles in 1940, 1941, and 1947.
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From page 301... ...
He was active in inviting speakers, some of whom included visitors from other states, like his close friend Edgar Anderson and his fellow plant systematist at the University of California, Los Angeles, Carl Epling. The critical players in the biosystematists were the interdisciplinary Carnegie team that included the Danish genecologist Jens Clausen, the taxonomist David Keck, and the physiologist William Hiesey.
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From page 302... ...
Stebbins had been selected because of the need for a comprehensive synthesis of plant evolution. In 1941 Edgar Anderson had delivered the Jesup Lectures with zoologist Ernst Mayr.
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Stebbins upheld the importance of most of the tenets emerging as the new consensus on evolutionary theory and was heavily influenced by Dobzhansky's Genetics and the Origin of Species. Stebbins stressed the centrality of natural selection but left plenty of room for random genetic drift and nonadaptive evolution, which had gained importance in the 1941 second edition of Dobzhansky's 1937 book.
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From page 304... ...
He enjoyed teaching undergraduate students, who received his courses with enthusiasm, which very much pleased Ledyard. He taught a popular evolution course to several hundred students every year.
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In 1975 he spent six weeks in the Soviet Union visiting scientific institutions, as a fellow of the Exchange Program, National Academy of Sciences, and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In 1974 he was research scientist and visiting professor in Montpellier, France, sponsored by the Commission Nationale des Recherches Scientifiques (CNRS)
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From page 306... ...
When I came out of the lecture, about 30 students were standing around looking at it." By the second half of the 1940s Stebbins was emerging as a leader in evolutionary biology. He was an active member of the recently established Society for the Study of Evolution and became its third president in 1950.
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From page 307... ...
He received the Lewis Prize of the American Philosophical Society in 1960, the Verrill Medal of Yale University in 1967, and the Gold Medal of the Linnaean Society of London in 1973. In December 1979 he was awarded the National Medal of Science, by President Carter.
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From page 308... ...
The colloquium celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Stebbins's classic 1950 book by examining current knowledge about the same topics of the 1950 book plus some related subjects that have become subjects of investigation owing to recent advances. Ledyard, although frail for the last few years, intended to attend the colloquium.
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From page 309... ...
1999. His own synthesis: Edgar Anderson and evolu tionary theory in the 1940s.
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From page 310... ...
30:519-530. 1940 The significance of polyploidy in plant evolution.
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From page 311... ...
In Essays in Evolution and Genetics in Honor of Theodosius Dobzhansky: Evolutionary Biology (Suppl)
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From page 312... ...
312 B I O G R A P H I C A L M E M O I R S 1976 Chromosomes, DNA and plant evolution.
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