Who is Asa Gray?

Asa Gray was one of the most prolific botanists of the 20th century. His Manual of Botany of the Northern United States was the most comprehensive taxonomic addition to botanical knowledge of its time.

Strangely enough, he started out in medicine, receiving an M.D. from Fairfield Medical School in Connecticut in 1831. While there, he spent his free time, or all the free time that a medical student would have, to collect plant specimens and educate him self in botany. Once he was done in Fairfield, he moved on to be an assistant professor of chemistry in New York, then switched to a more plant related job and published a textbook entitled Elements of Botany.

From there he spent some time in Europe studying the collections of North American specimens that his overseas colleagues had collected and spent a large chunk of time going on his own botanical excursions. Upon his return to the states in 1842, he received a professorship in natural history at Harvard. He donated his thousands of books and botanical specimens to the university and that eventually led to the establishment of Harvard’s botany department.

Not only was he an influential player in the field of descriptive natural history, but he was also one of Darwin’s earliest supporters. In July of 1860, a time when the theory of natural selection was a searing hot controversy, Gray published a review of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Gray’s approval of the theory and his willingness to debate prominent creationists on the matter in public forums was pivotal in Darwin’s success. Gray, a devout Christian and initial subscriber to the static, God’s-order idea of species, changed his mind about how species come to be after reanalyzing evidence he had gathered from his own scientific pursuits, and considering insights gained through numerous letters between Darwin and himself.

We are always free to change our minds.

Sources

Dobbs, David. “How Charles Darwin Seduced Asa Gray.” WIRED. WIRED Magazine, 28 Apr. 2011. Web. <http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2F2011%2F04%2Fhow-charles-darwin-seduced-asa-gray%2F>.

The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. “Asa Gray.” Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d. Web. 14 June 2016. <http://www.britannica.com/biography/Asa-Gray>.