Lecture

By: Edmund B. Wilson

Date: January 1, 1909

Source: Wilson, Edmund B. "The Cell in Relation to Heredity and Evolution." One of a series of centennial addresses in honor of Charles Darwin, given before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Baltimore, January 1, 1909. Printed in Fifty Years of Darwinism: Modern Aspects of Evolution. New York: Henry Holt, 1909, 98–100.

About the Author: Edmund Beecher Wilson (1856–1939) was born in Geneva, Illinois, and became a professor of zoology at Columbia University in 1891. He studied embryology, with a focus on cell biology, and became an advocate of the chromosome theory of inheritance. He established that sex chromosomes determine the sex of an organism.

Introduction

At times, technology stimulates science. The microscope, for example, invented by Dutch spectacle makers around 1590,...