Fritz Muller: A Naturalist in Brazil
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.23 (567 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0936015926 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 376 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-08-14 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
It is most praiseworthy that Brazil's foremost naturalist is being celebrated in this splendid biography. Fritz Muller, one of the great naturalists of the last half of the nineteenth century, became one of Darwin's most influential correspondents. David West has given us a superb biography of the German exile in Brazil who played a little recognized role in supplying Darwin with important data for his post-1865 evolutionary writings. Porter, Director, The Darwin Correspondence ProjectIt is time that Fritz Muller, Brazil's greatest naturalist and friend of Charles Darwin, received the proper recognition. --Duncan M
"great read for those who like history" according to CMP. The fans of 'immediate gratification' are missing a tremendous lot in life, including the understanding of how we arrived where we are now. Do not be misled by the butterfly on the cover: Fritz Muller was much more than a butterfly scholar. His research ranged from marine biology to plants. But even the non-biologists among us would know that he was the father of Mullerian mimicry, the convergent evolutionary resemblance among unrelated organisms that have some form of protection that can harm potential predators. This concept was originally based on Muller's observations of butt
His best known discovery is that of Mullerian mimicry, the imitation of the appearance of toxic species by other toxic species.. Muller was more than a naturalist. He was an enthusiastic liberal, one reason why he had to leave Germany, which after the failure of the 1848 revolution was ruled by ultra-conservatives. He had a good university education, yet did not hesitate in Brazil to earn his living as a farmer. Ernst Haeckel acknowledged a debt to him for his own biogenetic law, 'ontogeny recapitulates philogeny.' And at his death in 1897, the obituary writer in Nature questioned 'whether any other naturalist, save Darwin himself, has given the world so large and original a mass of observations of the kind by which natural selection has been most strongly supported.' Yet today, Fritz Muller is largely ignored in books about the great nineteenth-century naturalists. He published countless natural history observations throughout his life, on insects and other animals, and his later years particularly on plants. Charles Darwin called him 'prince of observers' and counted him among those whose opinions he valued most
This last project introduced him to Fritz Muller's legacy and the natural history of Muller's Brazil. . David A. West grew up in Beirut nad graduated from Phillips Academy and Cornell University. He joined the Biology Department of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 1962 after postdoct