Hugo de Vries and the Gene Concept

Abstract

In several of the jubilee publications on Darwinism it is accepted as established that Darwin's original hypothesis of natural selection could be transformed into a sound basis of neo-Darwinism only after Darwin's vague and partly erroneous views on heredity, as expressed in his "provisional hypothesis of pangenesis," were replaced by the modern theory of heredity based on Mendel's laws. In this lecture, I have tried to show that the fundamental rectifications of Darwin's theory were already provided in 1889 by Hugo de Vries in his book "Intracellulare Pangenesis." The influence of these conceptions of Hugo de Vries on the gradual development of theoretical insight into genetics, evolution and the species-concept has been expounded.