author
Hugo de Vries
1848–1935
A Dutch botanist who helped turn heredity and evolution into experimental science, he became one of the early pioneers of genetics. He is especially remembered for independently rediscovering Mendel’s laws and for introducing the term “mutation.”
3 Audiobooks
Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation
by Hugo de Vries
Het Yellowstone-Park
by Hugo de Vries
De aardbeving van San Francisco De Aarde en haar Volken, 1907
by Hugo de Vries
About the author
Born in Haarlem in 1848, Hugo de Vries studied botany in the Netherlands and Germany and went on to become a professor at the University of Amsterdam. His work helped move plant science from simple observation toward careful laboratory experiment, especially in the study of heredity and variation.
De Vries is best known as one of the scientists who brought Gregor Mendel’s ideas on inheritance back into wide attention around 1900. He also proposed that new species might arise through sudden changes, a view known as mutation theory. Even though some parts of that theory did not hold up in the long run, his research played an important role in the early development of genetics.
Today he is remembered as a major figure in the history of biology: a patient investigator of plants whose ideas helped shape modern thinking about how traits are passed on and how living things change over time.