de Candolle and Nature

Born February 4, 1778, Augustin Pyramus de Candolle was a Swiss botanist who documented hundreds of plant families and created a new system of plant classification. He contributed to the fields of botany, phytogeography, agronomy, paleontology, and others. He wrote of "Nature's war, which later influenced Darwin's idea of natural selection. de Candolle suggested that plants have internal biological "clocks." He also observed the phenomenon of what later was called convergent evolution--creatures without common ancestry develop similar traits within their shared ecological niches.