Society for the Study of Evolution

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The Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE) is an association of biologists founded in the USA in 1946 with the aim of promoting the study of the evolution of organisms. With this association of professional scientists, the field of evolutionary biology was established.

History of the SSE

On behalf of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the biologist organized Theodosius Dobzhansky 1939, a series of talks on speciation . On this occasion, the "architects" of synthetic theory, Dobzhansky, Julian Huxley and Ernst Mayr met and agreed to found a society for the study of speciation , which was also realized in 1940. Due to the Second World War , the project did not progress; In 1946 this concept was taken up in a new form. On March 30, 1946, the Society for the Study of Evolution was founded in St. Louis , Missouri (USA) under the direction of Ernst Mayr. The first document was signed by Mayr, Dobzhansky and other prominent biologists and can still be viewed in archives today. At the end of 1946, the SSE first published the journal Evolution - International Journal of Organic Evolution , which established evolutionary biology as a scientific discipline.

SSE program

As Ernst Mayr has pointed out, when the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE) was founded, it was planned to pool the previously unorganized studies on the evolutionary development of organisms and, based on synthetic theory , to promote systematic research on organismic evolution. Even today, the SSE bears its program in the subtitle - this association of natural scientists working mostly at universities pursues the agenda of a doctorate of the study of organic evolution , ie it is about the targeted promotion of the study of the evolution of organisms . With the establishment of the specialist journal Evolution - International Journal of Organic Evolution (founding editor: E. Mayr), an important journal was brought into being, which has been in use since the publication of its first volume (Vol. 1, 1946) until today (Vol. 67, 2013 ) plays a central role in evolutionary science. Until the mid-1940s, research on evolutionary biology was spread over numerous journals (e.g. the Biologische Zentralblatt, continued as Theory in Biosciences).

Related organization

Forty years after the founding of the SSE and the establishment of the scientific discipline evolutionary biology, the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) was founded in 1987 . In 2013 the ESEB had around 1,600 members. The goals were summarized as follows: Support of scientific studies on organismic evolution and integration of those areas of science that are directly related to the subject of evolution, such as B. Genetics , Ecology , Developmental Biology . ESEB publishes its own specialist journal, the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, and regularly organizes "evolution conferences", each of which takes place in a different European country.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Jürgen Haffer : Ornithology, Evolution, and Philosophy. The Life and Science of Ernst Mayr 1904-2005 . Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg 2007.
  2. ↑ a b c d Ulrich Kutschera : The issue of evolution. Darwinism and Intelligent Design. 2nd Edition. LIT-Verlag, Münster 2007.
  3. ↑ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/%28ISSN%291558-5646
  4. ↑ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/%28ISSN%291420-9101