Harlan Lewis, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

Harlan Lewis

Date of Birth: 01-Jan-1919

Place of Birth: Redlands, California, United States

Date of Death: 19-Dec-2008

Profession: botanist, geneticist

Zodiac Sign: Capricorn

Frank Harlan Lewis (January 8, 1919 – December 12, 2008) ("Harlan Lewis") was an American botanist, geneticist, taxonomist, systematicst, and evolutionist who worked primarily with plants in the genus Clarkia.
He is best known for his theories of "Catastrophic Selection," and "Saltational Speciation", which are closely aligned with the concepts of quantum evolution and sympatric speciation.
The concepts were first articulated in 1958 by Harlan Lewis and Peter H.
Raven, and later refined in a 1962 paper by Lewis in which he coined the term "Catastrophic Selection;" in 1966 he called this mechanism "Saltational Speciation." He was Dean of Life Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1962 to 1981, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1955), he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (1955), president of the Pacific Division of the Botanical Society of America (1959), president of Society for the Study of Evolution (1961), president of the American Society of Plant Taxonomists (1969), president of the International Organization of Plant Biosystematics (1969–1975), and president of the American Society of Naturalists (1971), as well as a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences.
In 2006 became the Dickson Emeritus Professor of the Year at UCLA.