The book offered few original hypotheses, but Stebbins hoped that by summarising the available research on plant evolution the book would "help to open the way towards a deeper understanding of evolutionary problems and more fruitful research in the direction of their solution." The book effectively ended any serious belief in alternative mechanisms of evolution in plants, such as Lamarckian evolution or soft inheritance, which were still upheld by some botanists. Following that publication, Stebbins was regarded as an expert on modern evolutionary theory and is widely credited with the founding of the science of plant evolutionary biology. "Variation and Evolution in Plants" continues to be widely cited in contemporary scientific botanical literature more than 50 years after its publication.