1. Lev Semyonovich Berg, known as Leo S Berg was a leading Russian geographer, biologist and ichthyologist who served as President of the Soviet Geographical Society between 1940 and 1950.
19 Facts About Lev Berg
1. 2.
Lev Berg is known for his own evolutionary theory, nomogenesis as opposed to the theories of Darwin and Lamarck.
3.
Lev Berg was born in Bessarabia in a Jewish family, the son of Simon Gregoryevich Berg, a notary, and Klara Lvovna Bernstein-Kogan.
4.
Lev Berg graduated from the Second Kishinev Gymnasium in 1894.
5.
Lev Berg later studied ichthyology and in 1928 was awarded he was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
6.
Lev Berg graduated from the Moscow State University in 1898.
7.
Lev Berg was one of the founders of the Geographical Institute, now a Faculty of Geography of the Saint Petersburg State University.
8.
Lev Berg studied and determined the depth of the lakes of Central Asia, including Balkhash and Issyk-Kul.
9.
Lev Berg developed Dokuchaev's doctrine of natural zones, which became one of the foundations of the Soviet biology.
10.
Lev Berg was said to have discovered the symbiotic relationship between lampreys and salmon.
11.
Lev Berg's name is featured in the Latin appellations of more than 60 species of plants and animals.
12.
Lev Berg spent the last two years of his life living in Komarovo.
13.
Lev Berg is best known for his evolutionary theory called nomogenesis, which was a type of orthogenesis or mutationism.
14.
Lev Berg's ideas were collected in his book Nomogenesis; or, Evolution Determined by Law and was first published in 1922 in Russia; it was later translated into English in two editions the first appearing in 1926 and the later edition appearing in 1969.
15.
Lev Berg claimed that the variation of characters in species is confined within certain limits due to both internal and external factors.
16.
The limitation of the variability, Lev Berg argued, left hardly any space for natural selection; he claimed this was supported by the paleontological record because all the phylogenetic branches look more or less like straight lines.
17.
In 1910, Lev Berg married fellow Bendery native Polina Abramovna Kotlovker.
18.
Lev Berg married Maria Mikhailovna Ivanova, the daughter of a ship's commander, in 1923.
19.
The research ship Lev Berg, named after him, currently rests on the dried bottom of the Aral Sea.