Dobzhansky, Theodosius

(born Jan. 25, 1900, Nemirov, Ukr., Russian Empire—died Dec. 18, 1975, Davis, Calif., U.S.) Ukrainian-born U.S. geneticist and evolutionist. He immigrated in 1927 to the U.S., where he taught at the California Institute of Technology, Columbia University, and Rockefeller University. He laid the groundwork for a theory combining Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics by changing the then commonly held view that natural selection produced something close to the best of all possible results and that changes would be rare and slow and not apparent over one life span. He observed extensive genetic variability in wild populations of Drosophila, and he found that in a given population some genes would regularly change in abundance with the seasons of the year.