Biography
Ivan Ivanovich Schmalhausen was born in Kiev, Russian Empire (now Ukraine) on April 23, 1884 to Luise Schmalhausen (Luisa Ludwigovna Schmalhausen) and Johannes Theodor Schmalhausen (1849–1894). His father was one of the founding fathers of Russian paleobotany.
In 1901 Ivan Ivanovich Schmalhausen graduated gymnasium and enrolled at Kiev University, but was expelled a year later after taking a part in the student disturbances. In 1902 he resumed his university studies at Kiev in the faculty of Biological Science. Around 1902 he became acquainted with the founder of the Russian school of evolutionary morphology, Alexey Severtzov (1866–1936). He went on to become Professor of Darwinism at Moscow University and Director of the Institute for Evolutionary Morphology.
In 1904 Schmalhausen, under the guidance of Severtzov, completed his first scientific work on the embryonic development of lungs in a Grass Snake. He graduated from the university on 1909.
In 1910 Schmalhausen married Lydia Kozlova, a teacher of French from a small provincial Russian town.
He educated many eminent botanists, including Józef Paczoski, the founder of phytosociology.
In 23 August 1948 he became victim of order 1208, one of a series signed by Minister of Higher Education in the USSR, S. Kaftanov, which led to the mass dismissals of many university professors. This destroyed his career, as it removed his professorship and also decreed that his books and research projects be destroyed. This was because he was accused of being a Weissmannist and pro-Morganist, who promoted the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection, at a time when T. D. Lysenko and his followers were emphasising a process of heredity that focused on interaction with the environment and the inheritance of acquired characteristics along Lamarckian lines. This theory was being put into practice in agriculture under Michurin, who claimed to have improved wheat using Lamarckian techniques, and was central to the Stalin's politics which stressed that hard work led to improvement in future generations.
He had just written his book Factors of Evolution, which was translated into English and published in the west in 1949 and returned to work in morphology.
In 1955, Schmalhausen was one of the signers of the "Letter of 300"—a collective letter by three hundred scientists denouncing Lysenkoism.
He died on October 7, 1963 in Leningrad.
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