[Arnab]

About T.H. Morgan:

Lifespan: 1866-1945

Died 60 years ago. Here's a brief description of his life that DOES NOT show anywhere that he didn't think evolution wasn't a fact:

"Morgan disagreed with Driesch on vitalism, but maintained a strong alliance with him on the importance of experimental methods. Morgan was interested in evolution, but skeptical of Darwinism, which he perceived to be too speculative and not grounded in observable phenomena. After 1900 he was also critical of Mendelism and the chromosomal theory of heredity.

In about 1908, Morgan began working with Drosophila. According to Garland Allen, he was trying to find macromutations a la Hugo de Vries, whom Morgan greatly admired. His approach was experimental evolution, an effort to distinguish among the evolutionary theories of the Darwinists, neo-Lamarckists, and de Vries by experimental breeding and Mendelian analysis. Before the turn of the century he was an opponent of Mendelism. As a professor at Columbia he became interested in experimental evolution. He worked closely with members of the Entwicklungsmechanik school, including Jacques Loeb, and pursued research in experimental embryology. It was probably Frank Lutz, a geneticist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, who introduced Morgan to the fruitfly Drosophila. This occurred in about 1907. He began using what was still basically a wild-type fly in experimental evolutionary studies, a precursor of later population genetics. Morgan selected for specific phontypic mutants in an effort to determine their selective value. The goal was to determine how heredity influenced evolution--another way to put it is to say he was trying to see whether either DeVriesian mutation or Mendelian heredity could be shown to drive Darwinian evolution. Studies of evolution, Morgan believed, should be done with non-domesticated organisms. Morgan began tinkering with the flies' environment to see if he could induce new mutations.

The white eye mutant, discovered in about 1908, marked the beginning of the most productive phase in Morgan's career. In 1910 Morgan began to find new mutations in Drosophila. Something in his protocol had worked, and his Drosophila colonies began to throw off mutations at an amazing rate. Robert Kohler calls this the "breeder reactor." With his small group, including Alfred Sturtevant, Calvin Bridges, and Hermann Muller, Morgan began to focus on Drosophila genetics and gene mapping. The "Fly Room" at Columbia became a bustling lab finely tuned for their mapping effort. Muller soon left the lab, but Bridges and Sturtevant stayed with Morgan for the rest of their careers (Bridges died in 1938; Sturtevant outlived Morgan).

In 1915, Morgan, Bridges, and Sturtevant published The Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity, a defining tome that established Drosophila as a key model system in genetics and set the standard for Mendelian gene mapping efforts. In 1928 Morgan moved his group to Caltech, where they remained until Morgan's death. Morgan won the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine."

All in all, it looks like MOrgan was skeptical of evolution BEFORE 1900 and later in his life actually did seminal work on flies that SUPPORTS evolution via experiment and was given the nobel prize for doing it!