Shmalhauzen, Ivan

Shmalhauzen, Ivan or Schmalhausen [Шмальгаузен, Іван; Šmal'hauzen], b 23 April 1884 in Kyiv, d 7 October 1963 in Moscow. Biologist, zoologist, and theorist in evolutionary studies; full member of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences from 1922 and the USSR Academy of Sciences (AN SSSR) from 1935; son of Ivan F. Schmalhausen. A graduate of Kyiv University (1907), he was a professor at the university (1921–41) and director of the Institute of Zoology of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (1930–41) and the AN SSSR Institute of Animal Morphology in Moscow (1935–48). He wrote Osnovy sravnitel'noi anatomii pozvonochnykh (Foundations of Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy, 1923) and conducted innovative embryological studies of the dynamics of growth. In 1938 he became a professor of Darwinism at Moscow University, and in the next decade he developed a modern evolutionary theory that integrated systematics, morphology, embryology, and population genetics. His four major publications in this field were Organizm kak tseloe v individual'nom i istoricheskom razvitii (The Organism as a Whole in Individual and Historical Development, 1938; repr 1982), Puti i zakonomernosti evoliutsionnogo protsessa (Trends and Laws of the Evolutionary Process, 1939), Faktory evoliutsii (Factors of Evolution, 1946; English edn 1949), and the innovative textbook of evolutionary biology Problemy darvinizma (Problems of Darwinism, 1946). Shmalhauzen was an outspoken critic of Trokhym Lysenko’s ‘creative Darwinism’ and was removed from his appointments in 1948. For the remainder of his career he worked at the AN SSSR Institute of Zoology on the origin of terrestrial vertebrates and on cybernetic approaches to evolutionary theory.

Mark Adams

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]