Edgar Anderson

Edgar Shannon Anderson (November 9, 1897 – June 18, 1969) was an American botanist. He introduced the term introgressive hybridization His work on the transfer and origin of adaptations through natural hybridization continues to be relevant.

Anderson was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1934. In 1954, he was an elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was also president of the Botanical Society of America in 1952, and was a charter member of the Society for the Study of Evolution and the Herb Society of America He received the Darwin-Wallace Medal of the Linnean Society in 1958.

Early life and education Anderson was born in Forestville, New York. When he was three, his family moved to East Lansing, Michigan where his father had accepted a position to teach dairy husbandry.

In 1914 Anderson entered Michigan State College to study botany and horticulture. After completing his degree in Biology in 1918,

Anderson returned to the United States in 1931 and took a position at the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard where he worked with geneticist Karl Sax. In 1935 he returned to the Missouri Botanical Garden and in 1937 received the Engelmann Professorship in botany at Washington University in St. Louis. Between 1934 and 1938 he worked predominantly on Tradescantia. He was the first to introduce the term introgressive hybridization. emphasizing the need to study both wild and cultivated plants.

Anderson published Introgressive Hybridization in 1949, describing gene transfer between hybridizing forms, He also wrote the popular science book Plants, Man, and Life (1952), described by one reviewer as "a book every botanist and anthropologist should read". Anderson was briefly director of the Missouri Gardens in 1954, but returned to teaching in 1957. He retired officially in 1967. They frequented the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory symposia. Anderson was a close friend of many other colleagues, such as J. B. S. Haldane and G. Ledyard Stebbins.