J.C.H. de Meijere (1866-1947), een voorzichtig geneticus en evolutiebioloog

Abstract

J.C.H. de Meijere (1866-1947), a cautious geneticist and evolutionary biologist After the success of Hugo de Vries' 'mutationism' during the socalled 'Eclipse of Darwinism' (see Bowler, 1983), Dutch biologists in the 20's and 30's had little interest in evolutionary theory. A remarkable exception was the entomologist J.C.H. de Meijere, who thought technical zoology and (1921-1936) genetics at Amsterdam University. De Meijere's career as a systematist, morphologist and (at the same time) geneticist contradicts G.E. Allen's 'revolt from morphology' hypothesis, following which a generation conflict was involved in the rise of experimental biology (see Allen, 1975). Although he had been trained in the nineteenth-century 'classical' descriptive tradition, his early articles on Mendelian genetics (1910-1915) showed distinctly 'experimental'-analytical features concerning their problem-definition. He did not carry out genetic experiments himself, due to a lack of time.In this paper I have analysed De Meijere's work on phylogenetic morphology, genetics and evolutionary biology. As a morphologist, De Meijere fits perfectly in the pattern of Dutch academical zoology of this period (see Theunissen and Donath, 1986). As a geneticist, he focussed on transmission genetics. He adopted Morgan's concept of gene mutation but at the same time he refused to reject neo-Lamarckian inheritance. His opinions on evolutionary issues were eclectic and somewhat cautious. He held a pluralistic view on the mechanisms of evolution, including Morgan mutation, 'moderate' Darwinian natural selection and neo-Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characters. Population genetics was absent in his writings. De Meijere's opinions on evolution united elements of descriptive and experimental traditions in biology, but this did not result in an evolutionary synthesis in a neo- Darwinian or any other sense. This stresses the importance of a conceptual gap between both traditions, which was eventually bridged by the neo-Darwinian synthesists in the late 30's and 40's (see Mayr and Provine, 1980).