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The modern synthesis [a] was the early 20th-century synthesis of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and Gregor Mendel's ideas on heredity into a joint mathematical framework. Julian Huxley coined the term in his 1942 book, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis .
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 27 February 2025. Science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms This article is about the general scientific term. For the scientific journal, see Genetics (journal). For a more accessible and less technical introduction to this topic, see Introduction to genetics. For the Meghan Trainor ...
In the 1920s and 1930s, the modern synthesis connected natural selection and population genetics, based on Mendelian inheritance, into a unified theory that included random genetic drift, mutation, and gene flow. This new version of evolutionary theory focused on changes in allele frequencies in population.
Precondition for the example: Two parent dogs (P-generation) are homozygous for two different genetic traits. In each case one parent has the dominant, one the recessive allele. Their offsprings in the F 1-generation are heterozygous at both loci and show the dominant traits in their phenotypes according to the law of dominance and uniformity.
The concept of natural selection originally developed in the absence of a valid theory of heredity; at the time of Darwin's writing, science had yet to develop modern theories of genetics. The union of traditional Darwinian evolution with subsequent discoveries in classical genetics formed the modern synthesis of the mid-20th century.
In the period 1961 – 1967, through work in several different labs, the nature of the genetic code was determined (e.g. [31]). In 1972, Walter Fiers and his team at the University of Ghent were the first to determine the sequence of a gene: the gene for bacteriophage MS2 coat protein. [ 32 ]
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's 1809 evolutionary theory, transmutation of species, was based on a progressive (orthogenetic) drive toward greater complexity. Lamarck also shared the belief, common at the time, that characteristics acquired during an organism's life could be inherited by the next generation, producing adaptation to the environment.
Biologists, however, have not limited their application of the term neo-Darwinism to the historical synthesis. For example, Ernst Mayr wrote in 1984 that: The term neo-Darwinism for the synthetic theory [of the early 20th century] is sometimes considered wrong, because the term neo-Darwinism was coined by Romanes in 1895 as a designation of Weismann's theory.