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was either black or white. He was very positive about any and all opinions. His
‘That is what I say’ was a proverb at Columbia University. To be quite frank, I was
sometimes quite upset by Dobzhansky’s megalomania. When he didn’t get his way
in some controversy or administrative arrangement, he could become extremely
difficult.
At that time there were distinctly two schools in population genetics; a reductionist
one going back to R.A. Fisher, and a holistic one. Dobzhansky definitely
belongedtotheholisticonebutwasnotnearlyasconcreteaboutitaseitherMichael
Lerner or Bruce Wallace or, for that matter, as myself. In the 1940’s and 1950’s when
I had my closest contact with genetics I benefited more from my conversations with
Bruce Wallace than with Dobzhansky.
Dobzhansky loved to travel and he wrote the most wonderful letters to his friends
which, eventually, Bentley Glass collected and published under the title The Roving
Naturalist (1980; American Philosophical Society). In addition to traveling he was
passionate about horseback riding and used every opportunity to do so.
In due time as he became more and more famous, Dobzhansky apparently was
not too happy being just one professor in the Columbia Zoology Department. And
this is why L.C. Dunn wanted to make a special genetics department for him. This
caused great dissension at Columbia.
Dobzhansky was notorious for being an egotist. He avoided all social responsibilities
and, for instance, never attended any committee meetings, not even the
facultymeetingsofhisdepartment.Hewasfuriouswhentheymadedecisionshe
didn’t like, but nevertheless continued not attending. He never served as the secretary,
treasurer, or editor of any society. The only office he was willing to accept was
that of the president, and he loved to give a presidential address in this capacity.
Dobzhansky had only one child, his daughter Sophie. He rather definitely stated
that more children would be a nuisance and would interfere with his work. Also,
whenthetimecameforSophietogotoschoolandsheandhiswifeNatashawanted
to move to one of the suburbs, Dobzhansky prevented it, so Sophie grew up so to
speak on the pavement of Manhattan. She was rather resentful about it, as well as
about being the only child and had herself, I believe, five children.
What was Dobzhansky’s influence on me? Most importantly, perhaps, his sensible
type of genetics reconciled me with genetics and geneticists whom I had been
rather opposed to previously. Presumably, it was he who cured me of any last
remnants of my Lamarckian past. On the other hand, I never followed him in his
extreme adherence to Sewall Wright’s ideas on neutrality. At a time when he still
thought his chromosome arrangements were without selective significance I already
was convinced they had and expressed this to him. Later on, when he and
Epling published the work on the ‘desert snow’ (Linanthus), it soon became obvious
to me that the distribution of white and blue color was not a strictly random
matter, but to some extent at least, controlled by selection. Even Sewall Wright
came around to this, but Dobzhansky only very slowly. He and I had quite a few
arguments about human blood groups and I said all along they must have selective
significance while Dobzhansky insisted that they were strictly neutral.