Plants, Edgar Anderson, and Evolutionary Theory

Missouri Botanical Garden, Saint Louis MO

Investigators

Abstract

SES 00-80295 - Kim J. Kleinman (Missouri Botantical Garden) "Plants, Edgar Anderson, and Evolutionary Theory" This post-doctoral fellowship supports an ongoing biographical project on Missouri Botanical Garden geneticist Edgar Anderson (1897-1969). Anderson was an important contributor to the mid-20th-century discussions among such evolutionary scientists as Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ernst Mayr, George Gaylord Simpson, and G. Ledyard Stebbins. He and Mayr shared the prestigious Jesup Lectures in 1941. Yet, with the exception of Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis's work on Stebbins, the contribution of botanists to the Evolutionary Synthesis has not been sufficiently examined. This award provides the opportunity to develop both existing and projected work into the outline of a full-length biography of Anderson, and to develop other publications about Anderson and his science. A major obstacle to Anderson scholarship is that he destroyed his correspondence. It has been only partially reconstructed at the Missouri Botanical Garden archives. Hugh lltis, a major theorist on the origin of maize and one of Anderson's students, not only has contributed to that effort but has recently commented that "his correspondence is one of the four or five focal points around which you can reconstruct the Evolutionary Synthesis." So, this award supports for travel to the American Philosophical Society, Pioneer Hybrid Corn Company, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Missouri, Cornell, Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and Michigan State University among other archives to make possible the assembly of much useful material on Anderson in the archived collections of collaborators, colleagues, students, and teachers. The aim would be to construct as full an Anderson archive as possible at the Missouri Botanical Garden. Finally, the retraining component provides for a sustained grounding in an important element of Anderson's science, biosystematics. Under the guidance of Missouri Botanical Garden botanist Peter Hoch and his colleagues, the PI is combining field and laboratory work with a study of current literature to see how Anderson's ideas have been elaborated.