Bernhard+Rensch

Zach Rubin **__Bernhard Rensch__** Bernhard Rensch is best known as a collaborator of Modern Evolutionary Synthesis.He was one of the main architects for the neo-darwinian synthesis (theory of evolution of natural synthesis). Rensch was born on January 21, 1900 in Thale, Germany. He served in the German army from 1917 to 1920 and then continued his studies, receiving his PH.D in 1922 from the University of Halle. He joined the Zoological Museum of the University of Berlin in 1925 as an assistant. His occupation was an Evoloutionary Biologist. In 1927 he took part in an evolutionary scientific expedition to the Lesser Sunda Islands and in 1953, to India where he discovered similaities between organisms. Bernhard Rensch studied how the geographical distribution of subspecies of polytypic species (refers to subgroup species) and complexes of closely related species, with attention to how native environmental factors influenced their evolution. He was awarded the Darwin-Walace Medal in 1950. On April 4, 1990 he died in Munster, Germany. Other than his work on how enviornmental factors influence evolution of geographically isolated populations, Rensch also contributed to the study of ethology (area of animal behavior) In 1929 he published the book //Das Prinzip geographischer Rassenkreise und das Problem der Artbildung,// which discussed the connection between geography and speciation. In 1947 he published a book that would later be translated into English under the title //Evolution Above the Species Level//. The book discussed how the evolutionary mechanisms that drove speciation could also explain the differences between higher Taxa (smaller groups of a species with a bigger group- like polythypic). He believed that geographic isolation (term used for species to be isolated from each other to an extent that prevents or interferes with genetic interchanger) of a species is a key part in evolution. Organisms set clear conditions on evolution and set ways to deal with location problems. When a species goes through a significant amount of evolution with Taxon, the previous stage of the species usually dies out and the new stage comes into the world. This included the areas of morphology (branch of biology that deals with living organisms), systematics (speciation or discription of what something is made of and how it works), animal geography, animal ecology, and the sensory and nerve physiology of animals. When he completed his expeditions and analysis of his subsequent data, he found connections in three major fields:the area of evolutionary theory, the trans-specific evolution of animal psychology, and Biophilosophy. Rensch's rule was proposed in 1950, which stated that this law "is an allometric law about the relationship between sexual size dimorphism (SSD) and which sex is larger. It observes that across species size dimorphism increases with increasing body size when the male is the larger sex, and decreases with increasing average body size when the female is the larger sex". In other words, living things of a certain species of the smaller veriety correlate with the larger variety. So for example: male house cats are bigger than female house cats, therefore male lions are bigger than female lions. Rensch's rule is used in modern science to help determine evolution,



vSources

Home page: http://abhsscience.wikispaces.com/ Timeline: http://abhsscience.wikispaces.com/Evolution+of+Evolutionary+Thought+Timeline Previous entry: http://abhsscience.wikispaces.com/Theodosious+Dobzhansky Next entry: http://abhsscience.wikispaces.com/G.G.+Simpson
 * 1) Bernhard Rensch. (2012, July 10). //Wikipedia//. Retrieved January 13, 2013, from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard
 * 2) Hutchinson, G. (1961, August). Physical Anthropology. //American Anthropologist//, //63//, 880-881.
 * 3) Department of Behavioural Biology. (1012, November 5). Google Translate. //Google Translate//. Retrieved January 16, 2013, from []