Nils Heribert-Nilsson


Nils Heribert-Nilsson was a Swedish botanist and geneticist.
Heribert-Nilsson received his Ph.D. at Lund University in 1915 with the thesis Die Spaltungserscheinungen der Oenothera lamarckiana. From 1934 to 1948 he was professor of botany, in particular systematics, morphology and plant geography, at Lund University.
Heribert-Nilsson was active in plant breeding. His most important research concerned Salix and its taxonomy, which is complicated by frequent hybridization. Among his research on Salix was hybridization studies on Salix viminalis and Salix caprea.
In 1943 he was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Emication

In 1953, Heribert-Nilsson published his most voluminous work Synthetische Artbildung. In a review for Science, Joel Hedgpeth summarizes the thesis of the "elegantly printed two-volume opus" as follows:
Oblivious to continental drift, Heribert-Nilsson invokes tremendous tsunamis for the fact that many fossil floras, such as that of the London Clay, consist of species whose modern relatives live in tropical countries far removed from the site of deposition, as G. Ledyard Stebbins writes in an article for The Quarterly Review of Biology in 1955.
According to Stebbins Heribert-Nilsson's final line of "evidence" against evolution consists of an attempt to criticise certain basic principles of genetics, particularly the linear order of the genes on the chromosomes.

Selected publications

  • Die Spaltungserscheinungen der Oenothera lamarckiana, Ph.D. Thesis, 1915.
  • Experimentelle Studien über Variabilität, Spaltung, Artbildung und Evolution in der Gattung Salix, 1918.
  • Synthetische Bastardierungsversuche in der Gattung Salix, 1930.
  • Linné, Darwin, Mendel: trenne biografiska skisser, popular science, 1930.
  • Der Entwicklungsgedanke und die moderne Biologie, 1941.
  • Synthetische Artbildung: Grundlinien einer exakten Biologie, 2 vols., 1953.