author
Hugo de Vries
1848–1935
A pioneering Dutch botanist who helped launch modern genetics, he is best known for bringing experiments into the study of heredity and evolution. His name is especially linked to the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws and to the early idea that new species could arise through sudden changes, or mutations.
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 became one of the key scientific figures in the shift from nineteenth-century natural history to modern genetics. He studied botany in the Netherlands and Germany, and later built his career as a professor in Amsterdam.
De Vries is remembered above all for his work on heredity. Around 1900, he was one of the scientists who brought renewed attention to Gregor Mendel’s principles of inheritance, helping make them central to biology. He also introduced the term "mutation" and developed a mutation theory of evolution based on plant experiments, especially with evening primrose.
Even where later genetics revised some of his conclusions, his influence remained enormous. He helped make evolution and inheritance subjects for careful laboratory study, and his books and experiments shaped how generations of readers understood change in the living world.