Ludwig Hermann Plate (16 August 1862 – 16 November 1937) was a German zoologist and student of Ernst Haeckel.

He wrote a "thorough and extensive defence" of Darwinism, but before Mendel's work had been assimilated in the modern synthesis.

[1][2] Born in Bremen, Plate studied mathematics and natural sciences Bonn and in Jena, where he attended the lectures of Ernst Haeckel.

[5] Plate was a proponent of what he called old-Darwinism or orthoevolution, which included a supposedly directed form of natural selection, orthoselection.

[4] He differed from the modern synthesis in accepting non-Darwinian mechanisms of evolution such as the Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics and orthogenesis.