Richard Goldschmidt (1878 - 1958)
Richard Goldschmidt (1878 – 1958) was a German-American geneticist and zoologist who made important contributions to the study of heredity and evolution. Born in Frankfurt, Germany, he received his PhD in zoology at the University of Heidelberg, and worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology (now the Max Planck Institute for Biology) in Berlin, where he conducted research on genetics and developmental biology.
Goldschmidt's
early experiments with the Gypsy Moth, Lymantria dispar, showed that genes could
alter adult morphology by changing patterns of development. He
suggested that genes operate as parts of coordinated systems,
and that large evolutionary changes might arise from changes
in developmental processes. His ideas were received
skeptically, because they contrasted with the then current
understanding that classical Mendelian genes affected single
traits.
At the outbreak
of World War I in 1914, Goldschmidt happened to be in the
United States, and was interned as an enemy alien until the
end of the war. He returned to Germany, but in 1935, because
of the rise of Nazism, he returned to the US and joined the
Department of Genetics at the University of California,
Berkeley, the oldest department by that name in the world . In
The Material Basis of
Evolution (1940), he presented his ideas about
genetics, development, and evolution. His theory of Macromutation stated that
"[T]he change from species to species is not a change
involving more and more additional atomistic changes
[individual
mutations], but a complete change of the primary
pattern or reaction system into a new one, which afterwards
may again produce intraspecific variation by micromutation."
That is, single large developmental mutations could produce "hopeful
monsters", organisms radically different from the
parental type, but capable of survival and reproduction in
novel environments. This contradicted the so-called Modern
Synthesis, that evolutionary change and speciation were
due to the accumulation of small mutational changes (micromutations)
such as those observable in Drosophila. Modern notions
of "Evo-Devo" and the importance of gene regulation
have revived interest in Goldschmidt's ideas.