Overview

During the 1930s and 1940s a group of biologists and scientists in a variety of related fields assembled a new picture of biological change, mutation, and variation, merging genetics with Charles Darwin's (1809-1882) vision of natural selection, and refining and altering understanding of both. Contributions to the new understanding of evolutionary processes came from population geneticists, paleontologists, ornithologists, mathematical geneticists, and naturalists. Because it drew upon so many fields, the view of evolution that emerged was called the Modern Synthesis or New Synthesis.

Background

In some cases, the synthesis was also known as neo-Darwinism, or new Darwinism, because it helped resolve many of the problems some scientists had found in the mechanics of Darwin's view of evolution. (In its most proper usage, neo-Darwinism was the movement that flourished between the death of Darwin and the arrival of...