Otto Schindewolf
| Otto Schindewolf | |
|---|---|
| Born | 7 June 1896 Hanover |
| Died |
10 June 1971 (aged 75) Tübingen |
| Nationality | Germany |
| Fields | paleontology |
| Institutions |
University of Marburg University of Tübingen |
| Known for | evolution of corals and cephalopods |
Otto Heinrich Schindewolf (7 June 1896 – 10 June 1971) was a German paleontologist who studied the evolution of corals and cephalopods.
Schindewolf was on the faculty at the University of Marburg from 1919 until 1927. Then he became director of the Geological Survey of Berlin. In 1948 he became a professor at the University of Tübingen, where he retired as professor emeritus in 1964.
He was a saltationist who opposed the theory of gradual evolution, and in the 1930s suggested that major evolutionary transformations must have occurred in large leaps between species. This idea became known as the Hopeful Monster theory and was further taken and developed up by the geneticist Richard Goldschmidt in the 1940s. Schindewolf was also the first to suggest, in 1950, that mass extinctions might have been caused by extraterrestrial impacts or nearby supernova. From 1948 until his retirement in 1964, Schindewolf was professor of Geology and Paleontology at the University of Tübingen.
As a saltationist Schindewolf had supported macromutations as part of his evolutionary theory. He was known for presenting an alternative interpretation of the fossil record, combining orthogenesis, mutationism and extraterrestrial impacts, as opposed to Darwin's gradualism. Schindewolf's theory claimed that variation tended to move in a predetermined direction. His theory became known as typostrophism and stated that evolution occurs due to a periodic cyclic model of evolutionary processes which are predestined to go through a life cycle dictated by factors internal to the organism.
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