Журнал векторной биологии

Th.Dobzhansky’s concept of human evolution

Mikhail B Konashev

In the history of biology many books and articles focused mainly on the development of evolutionary theory, which is understood to be the theory of biological evolution formed in 1930-1940 during the so-called “evolutionary synthesis” and called the “synthetic theory of evolution” (STE). In 1930-1940 and later the “founding fathers” of the STE such as E. Mayr, G. G. Simpson, L. Stebbins and other evolutionists made research strictly in their field and published no book or article on human evolution. The only exception was the Russian-American geneticist Th. Dobzhansky who in 1950s published several articles and books on human, and in the book “mankind evolving” published in 1962 offered his own concept of human evolution. A key statement of Th. Dobzhansky’s concept of human evolution was the conclusion that human evolution includes both its biological evolution and its cultural evolution, i.e. social evolution. And both evolutions not only influence one another, but also constantly interact, and both these evolutions are unfinished and continue. As in the case of Ch. Darwin an interest in the problem of human evolution was for Dobzhansky the main reason why he decided to deal with evolutionary biology and became a geneticist and evolutionist.