Leonard Doncaster

Leonard Doncaster (31 December 1877 – 28 May 1920) was an English geneticist and a lecturer on zoology at both Birmingham University and the University of Liverpool whose research work was largely based on insects.

Doncaster was born on 31 December 1887 in Sheffield, England.

After education at Leighton Park School and Cambridge University he became an academic at Cambridge University. He was an early Mendelian geneticist who discovered sex linkage, while writing up the results of the Reverend G.H. Raynor on the magpie moth Abraxas grossulariata. He later wrote a number of books on Mendelian genetics and on sex determination. He was appointed assistant to the Superintendent of the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology in June 1902, and himself filled this position from 1909 to 1914. He was elected to the Royal Society of London on the strength of these achievements in 1915. He died of sarcoma in 1920, and William Bateson wrote his obituary in Nature.

His book Heredity in the Light of Recent Research (1910), is notable for explicitly dismissing Lamarckian inheritance.

• Heredity in the Light of Recent Research (1910)
• A review of Heredity and Memory by James Ward (1912)
• The Determination of Sex (1914)
• Some Scientific Difficulties in the Way of Religious Belief (1916)
• An Introduction to the Study of Cytology (1920)

• Doncaster L., Raynor G.H. (1906). "Breeding experiments with Lepidoptera". Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London. 1: 125–133.