Edgar Anderson

[13] When he was three, his family moved to East Lansing, Michigan where his father had accepted a position to teach dairy husbandry.

After completing his degree in Biology in 1918,[14] he joined the Naval Reserve and in 1919 he accepted a graduate position at the Bussey Institution of Harvard University.

His studies were supervised by geneticist Edward Murray East and Anderson worked on the genetics of self-incompatibility in Nicotiana.

[3] In 1929 Anderson received a fellowship to undertake studies at the John Innes Horticultural Institute in Britain, where he worked with cytogeneticist C. D. Darlington, statistician R. A. Fisher, and geneticist J.

[16][17] Anderson returned to the United States in 1931 and took a position at the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard where he worked with geneticist Karl Sax.

[3] In 1941 Anderson was invited to present the Jesup Lectures at Columbia University with Ernst Mayr, discussing the role of genetics on plant systematics.

However, unlike the other presenters of the Jesup Lectures, whose writings would be regarded as the foundation of the modern evolutionary synthesis, Anderson never completed his accompanying manuscript for Systematics and the origin of species.