Stebbins was one of the first to apply chromosome techniques
to plant evolution. He taught at the University of California,
Berkeley, from 1935, and founded the Department of Genetics at
UC Davis in 1950. His 1950 book, "Variation and
Evolution in Plants," is one of cornerstones of
the the Modern Synthesis, and showed that evolutionary
mechanisms demonstrated in animals also occur in plants. His
1974 book, "Flowering Plants: Evolution Above
the Species Level," addressed questions of the
origin of new super-specific taxa of plants.