Richard Goldschmidt

Richard Benedict Goldschmidt (April 12, 1878 – April 24, 1958) was a German-born American geneticist. He is considered the first to integrate genetics, development, and evolution. He pioneered understanding of reaction norms, genetic assimilation, dynamical genetics, and heterochrony. Controversially, Goldschmidt advanced a model of macroevolution through macromutations that is popularly known as the "Hopeful Monster" hypothesis.

Goldschmidt also described the nervous system of the nematode, a piece of work that later influenced Sydney Brenner to study the wiring diagram of C. elegans, an achievement that later won Brenner and his colleagues the Nobel Prize in 2002.

Goldschmidt was born in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany of Jewish heritage.

Selected bibliography

 * Goldschmidt, R. (1917). Intersexuality and the endocrine aspect of sex. Endrocrinology 1, 433-456
 * Goldschmidt, R. (1923). The Mechanism and Physiology of Sex Determination, Methuen & Co., London. (Translated by William Dakin.)
 * Goldschmidt, R. (1929). Experimentelle mutation und das problem der sogenannten paralleinduktion. versuche an Drosophila. Biologischen Zentralblatt 49, 437–448
 * Goldschmidt, R. (1931). Die sexuellen Zwischenstufen, Springer, Berlin.
 * Goldschmidt, R. (1934). Lymantria. Bibliographia Genetica 111, 1-185
 * Goldschmidt, R. (1946). 'An empirical evolutionary generalization' viewed from the standpoint of phenogenetics. American Naturalist 80, 305
 * Goldschmidt, R. (1960) In and Out of the Ivory Tower, Univ. of Washington Press, Seattle.