The Modern Synthesis of Evolutionary Theory
Overview
During the 1930s and 1940s a group of biologists and scientists in a variety of related fields assembled a new picture of biological change, mutation, and variation, merging genetics with Charles Darwin's (1809-1882) vision of natural selection, and refining and altering understanding of both. Contributions to the new understanding of evolutionary processes came from population geneticists, paleontologists, ornithologists, mathematical geneticists, and naturalists. Because it drew upon so many fields, the view of evolution that emerged was called the Modern Synthesis or New Synthesis.
Background
In some cases, the synthesis was also known as neo-Darwinism, or new Darwinism, because it helped resolve many of the problems some scientists had found in the mechanics of Darwin's view of evolution. (In its most proper usage, neo-Darwinism was the movement that flourished between the death of Darwin and the arrival of the Synthesis; this movement attributed all changes in species to the effects of natural selection.)
More than half a century after Darwin presented his theory of the evolution of life by natural selection, the actual processes by which that evolution took place were still not understood. While few scientists questioned evolution as a process, natural selection itself had fallen into some disrepute as the engine of biological change over time.
This page contains 201 words.
The Modern Synthesis of Evolutionary Theory article
Read the rest of this article.
This article contains 1,907 words
(approx. 6 pages at 300 words per page).
Order our Modern evolutionary synthesis Article
