Lev Berg

Lev Semyonovich Berg, also known as Leo S. Berg (Russian: Лев Семёнович Берг; 14 March 1876 – 24 December 1950) was a leading Russian geographer, biologist and ichthyologist who served as President of the Soviet Geographical Society between 1940 and 1950.

He is known for his own evolutionary theory, nomogenesis (a form of orthogenesis incorporating mutationism) as opposed to the theories of Darwin and Lamarck.

Lev Berg was born in Bessarabia in a Jewish family, the son of Simon Gregoryevich Berg, a notary, and Klara Lvovna Bernstein-Kogan. He graduated from the Second Kishinev Gymnasium in 1894. Like some of his relatives, Berg converted to Christianity in order to pursue his studies at Moscow State University.

At Moscow University, Berg studied hydrobiology and geography. He later studied ichthyology and in 1928 was awarded he was also a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Lev Berg graduated from the Moscow State University in 1898. Between 1903 and 1914, he worked in the Museum of Zoology in Saint Petersburg. He was one of the founders of the Geographical Institute, now a Faculty of Geography of the Saint Petersburg State University.

Berg studied and determined the depth of the lakes of Central Asia, including Balkhash and Issyk-Kul. He developed Dokuchaev's doctrine of natural zones, which became one of the foundations of the Soviet biology. Among his pioneering monographs on climatology were "Climate and Life" (1922) and "Foundations of Climatology" (1927).

During his lifetime, Berg was a towering presence in the science of ichthyology. In 1916, he published four volumes of the study of Fishes of Russia. The fourth edition was issued in 1949 as Freshwater Fishes of the Soviet Union and Adjacent Countries and won him the Stalin Prize. He was said to have discovered the symbiotic relationship between lampreys and salmon. Berg's name is featured in the Latin appellations of more than 60 species of plants and animals.

He spent the last two years of his life living in Komarovo.