John Colton Greene (March 5, 1917, Indianapolis, Indiana – November 12, 2008, Pacific Grove, California)[1] was an American historian of science.
He is known for his influential study of the history of evolutionary thought, The Death of Adam, for academic controversies with Neo-Darwinians, particularly Ernst Mayr, collected in Debating Darwin, and for his studies of early American science, particularly American Science in the Age of Jefferson.
His father was a professor at Butler College, Indiana at his birth, then moved to University of South Dakota in 1919.
He was drafted into the US Army in 1942, and served from September 1942 to April 1946, travelling to five continents and attaining the rank of captain.
[4] While stationed in Teheran, he, as a first lieutenant, met Ellen Wiemann (1917–1998), a Red Cross nurse from Larchmont, New York.