Obituary: George Ledyard Stebbins Jr. (1906-2000)

Received from Botany Electronic News (BEN), 2 Feb. 2000:

Professor G. Ledyard Stebbins Jr., one of the leading evolutionary biologists and foremost botanists of the 20th century, died Wednesday, January 19, at his home in Davis. He was 94.

Professor Stebbins was one of the architects of the intellectual watershed known as the evolutionary synthesis, the period during which knowledge from the study of fossils, genetics, cells and the evolutionary history of organisms was incorporated into the theories of Charles Darwin, creating what is now evolutionary biology. In his book "Variation and Evolution in Plants" Professor Stebbins displayed an encyclopedic knowledge of botanical studies from fossils to chromosomes as he provided a detailed argument that plants were subject to the same processes of evolution as animals, an idea that biologists today take as a given.

George Ledyard Stebbins Jr. was born Jan. 6, 1906, in Lawrence, N.Y. He entered Harvard in 1924 intending to become a lawyer. But he came under the sway of a charismatic Harvard professor, Merritt Lyndon Fernald, one of the century's leading botanists and editor of the botanical bible, "Gray's Manual of Botany." Professor Stebbins entered Harvard graduate school to study botany in 1926.

After graduate school, Professor Stebbins became a professor at Colgate University. He later took a position at the University of California at Berkeley and eventually UC Davis.

He was also an early conservationist. In 1967 while president of the California Native Plant Society, he was influential in attempts to conserve native plants and habitats. In 1967, he prevented the destruction of a raised beach on the Monterey Peninsula that he dubbed Evolution Hill, now called the S.F.B. Morse Botanical Area, where Professor Stebbins said all the problems and principles of evolution could be seen played out among the plant species.

Professor Stebbins served as president of the American Society of Naturalists, the Western Society of Naturalists, the Botanical Society of America and the California Botanical Society and as secretary general of the Union of Biological Sciences. He was also a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

[Abbreviated from a posting on TAXACOM. See also:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/01/22/MN76135.DTL