Iwan Iwanowitsch Schmalhausen

Ivan Schmalhausen ( Russian Иван Иванович Шмальгаузен * April 11 ^{. Jul} / 23. April  1884 ^greg. In Kiev , † 7. October 1963 in Leningrad ) was a Russian zoologist and evolutionary biologist .

Live and act

Schmalhausen was the youngest son of Johannes Theodor Schmalhausen (1849-1894), who was one of the founders of Russian paleobotany . After graduating from high school, he enrolled at the University of Kiev in 1901 , where he was expelled in the course of the student unrest, but was able to resume studying natural sciences in 1902. Under the guidance of Nikolai Severtsov he examined 1904, the embryonic development of the lungs of the grass snake . Due to the early death of his father, he had to interrupt his studies to work as a teacher. In 1909 he researched the development of the limbic system in the Siberian angular newt ( Salamandrella keyserlingii ). In 1912 he became an assistant to Severzow at Moscow University ; between 1914 and 1916 he was at the Naples Zoological Station , where he laid the foundations for his doctorate.

Due to the October Revolution, he was unable to take up an extraordinary position at the University of Tartu and taught zoology and comparative anatomy in Voronezh from 1918 to 1921 . In 1921 he moved to Kiev, where he had been director of the institute since 1924 and devoted himself to phenogenetic studies, which he interpreted in evolutionary terms. From 1922 he was a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences . From 1936 he also headed the Moscow Institute for Evolutionary Morphology founded by Severzow, which was evacuated to Borowoje from 1940 due to the war .

There he wrote his main works, Problemy Darwinizma (1946) and The Evolution Factors . A theory of stabilizing selection (1946). The latter was translated into English in 1949 and is considered the most important Russian work on the theory of evolution. It makes it clear that there was an independent approach in Russian biology to the so-called synthetic theory of evolution , which founded modern evolutionary biology. According to Theodosius Dobzhansky , he was one of the protagonists of the renewed Darwinism.

On August 23, 1948 Schmalhausen during the debate over the was Lysenkoism victims of Stalinist decree in 1208, which the Minister of Higher Education Sergei Kaftanov had enacted. Since he was considered a proponent of the views of August Weismann and Thomas Hunt Morgan , he was fired, his research projects were terminated and his evolutionary publications were banned. During this time he emphasized that he was not a geneticist but a developmental biologist. After the end of the Stalinist era, he became director of the embryological laboratory of the Zoological Institute in Leningrad in 1955, where he wrote a monograph on the origin of terrestrial vertebrates. In the last years of his life he dealt with reformulating the theory of evolution using cybernetics .

From today's perspective, Schmalhausen's evolutionary factors are almost as important as Julian Huxley's programmatic presentation of evolution. The Modern Synthesis (1942). Independently of Conrad Hal Waddington's genetic assimilation , he introduced “stabilizing selection” (as it is called) and sought an explanation for the interplay between variation in ontogenesis and selection / evolution in phylogeny .

In 1959 he received the Darwin plaque and in 1960 he became a member of the Leopoldina .

Schmalhausen's Law

Schmalhausen's law is a general principle according to which a population that lives on the border of tolerance, under extreme or unusual conditions, is also vulnerable to small changes in other areas.

Honors

Since 1992, the Russian Academy of Sciences has awarded the Schmalhausen Prize for outstanding achievements in the field of evolutionary biology.

Fonts

• Problemy Darwinizma . Moscow 1946
• The evolutionary factors. A theory of stabilizing selection . Franz Steiner Verlag, Wiesbaden 2010 (initially 1946, Russian)
• The origin of terrestrial vertebrates. Academic Press; New York 1968

literature

• Mark B. Adams (1980): Severtsov and Schmalhausen: Russian Morphology and the Evolutionary Synthesis, in Ernst Mayr & William Provine (Eds.) The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., P. 193-225.
• Johann-Peter Regelmann: The history of Lyssenkoism . Rita G. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1980.

Web links

• Article Iwan Iwanowitsch Schmalhausen in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (BSE) , 3rd edition 1969–1978 (Russian)http: //vorlage_gse.test/1%3D124215~2a%3D~2b%3DIwan%20Iwanowitsch%20Smalhausen
• The Germans in the History of Kiev - Iwan Schmalhausen on the website of the Center for German Culture "Wiederstrahl" (Ukrainian)
• Tours through Kiev - Iwan Schmalhausen on Reisen-kiew.com , April 23, 2013

References and comments

1. ^ ^{A b c} Georgy S. Levit, Uwe Hossfeld, Lennart Olsson: From the "Modern Synthesis" to Cybernetics: Ivan Ivanovich Schmalhausen (1884–1963) and his Research Program for a Synthesis of Evolutionary and Developmental Biology . (PDF) In: Wiley - Liss Inc. (Ed.): Journal of Experimental Zoology . 306B, No. 2006, 2006, pp. 89-106. doi : 10.1002 / now for 21087 . PMID 16419076 . Retrieved April 25, 2007.
2. ↑ Website of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine ( Memento of the original dated November 30, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. - Member page Shmal'gauzen Ivan Ivanovych, accessed on November 29, 2016  
3. ↑ Problems of Darwinism
4. ↑ Cf. Rolf Löther (2006): On the history of synthetic Darwinism. Announcement at the meeting of the class for natural sciences on May 11, 2006. Meeting reports of the Leibniz-Sozietät 85 (2006), 113–116  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
5. ↑ Massimo Pigliucci, Courtney J. Murren, Carl D. Schlichting Phenotypic plasticity and evolution by genetic assimilation Journal of Experimental Biology 209, 2362-2367 (2006), as well as David B. Wake foreword to the German edition in: I. Schmalhausen Evolutionsrechte Wiesbaden 2010 , Pp. VII-IX
6. ↑ Member entry of Ivan Schmalhausen at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on October 22, 2015.
7. ^ Richard Lewontin & Richard Levins Schmalhausen's Law. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism , 11 (4) (2000): 103-108
8. ^ I.-I.-Schmalhausen Prize. Russian Academy of Sciences, accessed August 6, 2018 ( Russian Премия имени И.И. Шмальгаузена ).