Genetics and the Origin of Species the 1990 edition of "Great Books of the Western World", placing it with Charles Darwin's two great works "The Origin of Species" and "The Descent of Man". A third edition was published in 1951. Genetics and the Origin of Species Genetics and the Origin of Species is a 1937 book by the Ukrainian-American evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky. It is regarded as one of the most important works of the modern synthesis, and was one of the earliest. The book popularized the work of population genetics to other biologists, and influenced their appreciation for the genetic basis of evolution. In his
On the Origin of Species an incipient species" and that "species are only strongly marked and permanent varieties". He argues for the ubiquity of variation in nature. Historians have noted that naturalists had long been aware that the individuals of a species differed from one another, but had generally considered such variations to be limited and unimportant deviations from the archetype of each species, that archetype being a fixed ideal in the mind of God. Darwin and Wallace made variation among individuals of the same species central to understanding the natural world. In Chapter III, Darwin asks how varieties "which I have called incipient species"