Revising Plants, man and life: Edgar Anderson reshapes a classic book

On at least four occasions, Edgar Anderson (1897–1969) began revising his book Plants, man and life (1952). Given both its place in Anderson's career and his place in the development of evolutionary theory in the mid-twentieth century, the emendations are noteworthy. Though a popular work, Plants, man and life served as the distillation of Anderson's ideas on hybridization as an evolutionary mechanism, the need for more scientific attention on domesticated and semi-domesticated plants, and the opportunities such plants provided for the study of evolution. Anderson was an active participant in several key events in what historians have come to call the Evolutionary Synthesis. For example, he and Ernst Mayr shared the 1941 Jesup Lectures on “Systematics and the origin of species”. Anderson's proposed revisions to his book reflect both an attempt to soften certain acerbic comments as well as an attempt to recast the book as a whole.