Featuring an introduction by Stephen Jay Gould, "Genetics and the Origin of Species" presents the first edition of Dobzhansky's groundbreaking and now classic inquiry into what has emerged as the most important single area of scientific inquiry in the twentieth century: biological theory of evolution. Genetics and the Origin of Species went through three editions (1937, 1941, and 1951) in which the importance accorded natural selection changed radically. In 1936, nearly ten years after his Russian emigration, Theodosius Dobzhansky attempted the first synthesis of evolutionary semantics and experimental genetics. His lectures at Columbia University from that time became Genetics and the Origin of Species- a long argument for a general attitude toward nature and a specific approach that unified the disparate elements of evolutionary theory.