Biography

American botanist. Grant wrote extensively on evolution and genetics, including the influential book Plant Speciation (1971) and the important synthesis of evolutionary genetics in angiosperms, Genetics of Flowering Plants (1975). Verne Edwin Grant was born in San Francisco, where his interest in natural history was spurred by reading Darwin's Origin of Species while in school. He studied botany at the University of California at Berkeley and after graduating in 1940 set off on a motorcycle to South America, where he spent five years. At first he worked as a travelling naturalist before the Second World War demanded his services as a translator in Panama. Returning to California, Grant gained his PhD in botany and genetics from Berkeley (1949) and moved on to work at the Carnegie Institution of Washington at Stanford University and then the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden as a geneticist and experimental taxonomist. After stints as a biology professor at Texas A&M University and the University of Arizona, and directing the Boyce Thompson Southwestern Arboretum, Grant joined the University of Texas at Austin in 1970, where he remained until his death.

His favoured fields of research were species biology, pollination ecology, plant genetics and evolutionary theory. He wrote more than 150 papers and books, including volumes on flower pollination in the phlox family and hummingbirds as pollinators (co-authored with his wife, Karen A. Grant), and on evolutionary theory, The Origins of Adaptations (1963). He served as vice president and president of the Society for the Study of Evolution in 1966 and 1968. As well as a love of the outdoors, Grant was a locomotive enthusiast, owning a very expensive train set at home and taking a keen interest in the railway that passed through Austin.