Which of these naturalists synthesized

Morgan confirmed Mendelian laws of inheritance and the hypothesis that genes are located on chromosomes. Ronald Fisher produces the paper The Correlation between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance , showing how the continuous variation measured by biometricians could be the result of the action of many discrete genetic loci. Raymond Dart publishes in Nature a description of the Taung child, a fossil skull from Taung near Johannesburg, of the species Australopithecus africanus.

Conrad Hal Waddington proposes the evolutionary process of genetic assimilation in Canalization of Development and the Inheritance of Acquired Characters , followed by several other important papers and books, including The Strategy of Genes.

His famous epigenetic landscape as a metaphor for gene regulation has become reprinted and re-interpreted ever since. Francis Crick , James Watson and Rosalind Franklin discover the chemical structure of deoxyribonucleic acid DNA and show that it meets the unique requirements for a substance that encodes genetic information. Charles Sibley and Jon Ahlquist demonstrate that chimpanzees are more closely related to humans than to gorillas. Mary Jane West-Eberhard publishes Developmental Plasticity and Evolution , which focuses on the role of environmentally generated variation in evolution and speciation.

Richard Green and colleagues publish a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome, suggesting that that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred. Genetics gave scientists a mathematical framework for exploring natural selection and opened up questions about how reproduction affects which genes get passed on to offspring. Theodosius Dobzhansky, born in in Nemyriv, Ukraine then part of the Russian Empire , to a Russian-speaking family, would become one of the foremost architects of the Modern Synthesis.

He investigated population genetics in Drosophila pseudoobscura and gathered empirical evidence for the genetics underlying natural selection and speciation.

Dobzhansky wanted to find out how genetic variation could lead to shifts at the population level and potentially to evolutionary changes. To that end, he tracked mutations and differences between fly populations in the lab.

Dobzhansky noted the arrangements of chromosomes in different Drosophila species as well as their mutation rates.

A large body of evidence for this hypothesis was published in Darwin's Origin of Species one year later, the appearance of which provoked other leading scientists like August Weismann to adopt and amplify Darwin's perspective. Weismann's neo-Darwinian theory of evolution was further elaborated, most notably in a series of books by Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ernst Mayr, Julian Huxley and others. In this article we first summarize the history of life on Earth and provide recent evidence demonstrating that Darwin's dilemma the apparent missing Precambrian record of life has been resolved.