[1] De Candolle recognized that multiple species may develop similar characteristics that did not appear in a common evolutionary ancestor; a phenomenon now known as convergent evolution.

[3] Nevertheless, he is said to have had great aptitude for learning, distinguishing himself in school with his rapid acquisition of knowledge in classical and general literature and his ability to write fine poetry.

[9] In 1804, de Candolle published his Essai sur les propriétés médicales des plantes and was granted a doctor of medicine degree by the medical faculty of Paris.

de Candolle then spent the next six summers making a botanical and agricultural survey of France at the request of the French government, which was published in 1813.

[10] During this period, de Candolle became a close acquaintance of the Portuguese polymath, José Correia da Serra, who was Portuguese ambassador to Paris and who circulated in an international network of thinkers ranging from the Briton Joseph Banks to the Americans Thomas Jefferson and William Bartram, and the French scholars Antoine Laurent de Jussieu and Georges Cuvier.

Correia's endorsement of the idea of emphasizing similarity and symmetry in classifying plants influenced de Candolle, who acknowledged as much in his writing.

de Candolle published initial work in his Regni vegetabillis systema naturale, but after two volumes he realized he could not complete the project on such a large scale.

[17] He married Mademoiselle Torras and their son, Alphonse Pyramus de Candolle, eventually succeeded to his father's chair in botany and continued the Prodromus.

Consequently, this made him the first to attempt to attribute specific reasons for structural and numerical relationships amongst organs, and thus to distinguish between major and minor aspects of plant symmetry.

[14] To account for modifications of symmetry in parts of different plants, an occurrence that could hinder the discovery of an evolutionary relationship, de Candolle introduced the concept of homology.

Building upon earlier work on plant circadian leaf movements contributed by such scientists as Jean-Jacques d'Ortous de Mairan and Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau, de Candolle observed in 1832 that the plant Mimosa pudica had a free-running period of leaf opening and closing of approximately 22–23 hours in constant light, significantly less than the approximate 24-hour period of the Earth's light-dark cycles.

[33] In the mid-1920s, Erwin Bunning repeated Candolle's findings and came to similar conclusions, and studies that showed the persistence of circadian rhythm in the South Pole and in a space lab further confirmed the existence of oscillations in the absence of environmental cues.