Stebbins, George Ledyard (1906–2000)

US botanist and plant geneticist who was the first scientist to apply neo-Darwinism to plants in his Variation and Evolution in Plants 1950. With Ernest B Babcock, he developed a technique for doubling the chromosome number of a plant and producing polyploids (plants possessing three or more sets of chromosomes) artificially.

Stebbins was born in New York and studied biology at Harvard University, graduating with a PhD in 1931. He was a lecturer at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. In 1950, he went to the University of California, where he founded the genetics department at the Davis campus, and remained at the University of California until 1973. Stebbins has written several books on evolution including: Processes of Organic Evolution 1966, Flowering Plants: Evolution Above the Species Level 1974, and Evolution 1977 with Theodosius Dobzhansky, Francisco Ayala, and J Valentine.