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German–American zoologist (1904–2005)
Born at Kempten in Germany, Mayr was educated at the universities of Griefswald and Berlin, where he obtained his PhD in 1926. He then served as assistant curator of the museum there before moving to America in 1932. After spending many years at the Museum of Natural History, New York, he moved to Harvard in 1953 to serve as Agassiz Professor of Zoology, in which post he remained until his retirement in 1975.
As a field zoologist Mayr has worked extensively on the birds of the Pacific. Beginning with his New Guinea Birds (1941), he published a number of surveys and monographs on the ornithology of the area.
He is, however, better known for such works as Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942) and Animal Species and Evolution (1963) in which, at the same time as such other scholars as George Simpson and Theodosius Dobzhansky in America and Julian Huxley in Britain, he attempted to establish a neo-Darwinian synthesis. The enterprise has continued to hold together fairly well against the onslaughts of such critics as Motoo Kimura and has so far absorbed, without major upset, the massive inflow of data from the new discipline of molecular biology.
| Biography: Ernst Mayr |
The German-born American evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr (born 1904) helped lead the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory. Mayr made major contributions to ornithology, evolutionary theory and the history and philosophy of biology. He is best known for his work on speciation - how one species arises from another.
Ernst Mayr was born in Kepten Germany, near the borders of Austria and Switzerland on July 5, 1904. He was one of three sons of Helene Pusinelli Mayr and Otto Mayr, who was a judge. The Mayr family valued education and Mayr and his brothers were provided with a broad education that included the study of Latin and Greek. All three sons became professionals. As a boy, Mayr developed a keen interest in birdwatching - an interest that remained with him for life. Mayr began to study medicine in 1923 at the University of Greifswald, but within two years he became so enthralled with the evolutionary works and studies of Charles Darwin that he switched his studies from medicine to zoology. His interest in birds had led him to the German ornithologist Erwin Stresemann, who induced him to make the switch to zoology. As his mentor, Stresemann had a great influence on Mayr's thinking as well as his career. Starting with his earliest work, Mayr saw the value of asking evolutionary questions in biogeographical studies, and he consistently argued for an evolutionary basis to species concepts. Conversely, he used biogeography and taxonomy in the effort to explain evolution where in 1926 he received his Ph.D. in zoology. Soon afterward he became the zoological museum's assistant curator.
Following his doctoral degree in zoology from the University of Berlin in 1926, Mayr became an assistant curator in the university's museum. His chance to explore was provided by the wealthy zoologist and collector Lord Walter Rothschild the next year when Mayr agreed to lead his expedition for ornithological exploration and collection in the mountains of Dutch New Guinea. Although the trip was not easy, his success gave him experience and fame in the ornithological world; invitations for expeditions immediately followed, including one to New Guinea for the University of Berlin and the Whitney South Sea expedition to the Solomon Islands for the American Museum of Natural History, New York. This led to his appointment to work on the collected material at the museum in New York. When the museum bought Rothschild's enormous bird collection in 1931, Mayr was an obvious choice for curator, and he became a permanent staff member - and a naturalized U.S. citizen. He married Margarete Simon in 1935; they had two daughters.
The experiences and insights crowded into these years in the South Pacific were to stimulate Mayr's thinking about biology and the development of species for decades to come. In a number of monographs during the 1930s, as he worked on the taxonomy of South Pacific birds, Mayr turned to the theoretical problems of distinguishing species. More complex than its modest title implies List of New Guinea Birds (1941) explores the ways closely related species can be distinguished from one another and variations can arise within a species. This work and two field guides for South Pacific birds included bio-geographical work that led him to the idea that natural population groups might provide the proper basis for differentiations. Stephen Jay Gould wrote that Mayr "sharpened his notion of species as fundamental units in nature and deepened his understanding of evolution." Also, he had worked with Rothschild's curators Ernst Hartert and Karl Jordan, pioneers of both a biological species concept and the use of subspecific names reflecting geography.
During the 1930's and 1940's biologists accepted the broad premise of Darwin's theory about evolution - that species change and evolve through a process called natural selection. Mayr realized, along with many taxonomists and other biologists, that reform was needed in the concept of species, for the traditional dependence on morphological difference was misleading. Mayr argued brilliantly for a new synthesis, to wed species concepts more firmly to genetics and to the updated Darwinian theory being produced by population geneticists and evolutionary theorists in many subdisciplines. Neo-Darwinism stresses natural selection of genetic differences within populations as the fundamental cause of evolution, and Mayr's biological species concept reflects the reality of populations in the history of life. His "new systematics" thus defines a species as a genetically interacting group, isolated in reproduction from others.
Biologists embraced the revised concept, for it also made species into a real entity, and not merely an arbitrary grouping. Moreover, the variation seen within species became a biologically important phenomenon. Mayr, more than anyone else, led the promotion of the biological species concept and introduced evolutionary genetics to taxonomists with his highly influential Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942).
This book also argued that in the evolving of new species the crucial step is reproductive (genetical) isolation, by whatever means. Rejecting current alternative theories of rapid speciation by mutation or Lamarckism, Mayr's geographical speciation process depends on the gradual accumulation of small changes under natural selection; the usual causes would be environmental change or geographical barriers establishing local, isolated populations.
The decline of Darwinism within biology that had persisted since the late 1800s was reversed after the 1930s, with natural selection again regarded as a fundamental cause of evolution. By answering the speciation question with ideas from genetics and from ecological studies, Mayr became an important architect and spokesman for the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory. He also was instrumental in the founding of the Society for the Study of Evolution and its journal Evolution, serving as its first editor from 1947 to 1949. His theories about speciation not only found general acceptance but won Mayr great respect as well. E.O. Wilson commented that "He gave taxonomy an evolutionary perspective. He got the show on the road."
Mayr resigned his curatorship in 1953 and moved to Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology; he was director of that museum from 1961 to 1970. In further work on speciation theory he emphasized the founder effect, in which changes start with isolation of a small subpopulation, carrying a limited gene pool and perhaps living in changed environmental circumstances. Mayr's field experience led him to conclude that selection would operate in this way often on the periphery of a species' range, allowing what he termed peripatetic speciation. Presented as a staunchly neo-Darwinian position, especially in his landmark Animal Species and Evolution (1963), this speciation theory does allow rapid change in founder populations and has led some evolutionists, such as Stephen Jay Gould, to argue for a less gradual mode of evolution. Mayr maintained the adequacy of the Modern Synthesis position, as so ably expounded in his 1963 book.
Always interested in a wide range of subjects, Mayr also wrote influentially on the philosophy and history of biology. Summing up and expanding upon his many papers is The Growth of Biological Thought (1982), which presents his historical analysis of ideas about the organization and evolution of life.
Already honored with numerous degrees and medals, Mayr was the recipient in 1984 of the Balzan prize, considered to be the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for the biological sciences. He also holds ten honorary degrees, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, received the Darwin-Wallace Medal in 1958, the Linnean Medal in 1977, the Gregor Mendel medal in 1980 and the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1987. In 1994, at the age of 90, Mayr was awarded the prestigious Japan Prize by the Committee on the International prize for biology.
In an 1983 interview in Omni, Mayr discussed many of the concerns that he expressed throughout his career "Man must realize that he is part of the ecosystem and that his own survival depends on not destroying that ecosystem". He remained pessimistic about the future of the human race. When Mayr retired from Harvard as professor emeritus of zoology in 1975, Stephen Jay Gould observed that he really only changed careers - from a scientist he became a historian of science. In 1991, at age 87, he published another carefully wrought discussion of evolution One Long Argument in which he stated "the basic theory of evolution has been confirmed so completely that modern biologists consider evolution simply a fac…. Where evolutionists today differ from Darwin is almost entirely on matters of emphasis. While Darwin was fully aware of the probabalistic nature of selection, the modern evolutionist emphasizes this even more. The modern evolutionist realizes how great a role chance plays in evolution."
In 1997, The Science of the Living World was released to great acclaim by the scientific community. In it Mayr managed to condense the complicated history of biological thought. He tried to promote a view of knowledge acquisition called evolutionary epistemology which suggests that human understanding evolves like life itself.
Further Reading
Mayr anthologized his most influential articles, with an autobiographical and explanatory section, in his Evolution and the Diversity of Life (1976). He is also included in the McGraw-Hill Modern Men of Science, vol. II (1968). His own works include List of New Guinea Birds (1941); Systematics and the Origin of the Species (1942); Animal Species and Evolution (1963); The Growth of Biological Thought (1982); One Long Argument (1991); The Science of the Living World (1997).
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Ernst Mayr |
| Wikipedia: Ernst W. Mayr |
| Ernst W. Mayr | |
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 Ernst W. Mayr
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| Born | July 5, 1904 Kempten, Germany |
| Died | February 3, 2005 (aged 100) Bedford, Massachusetts |
| Residence | United States |
| Nationality | German |
| Fields | evolutionary biology |
| Notable awards | Linnean Society of London's Darwin-Wallace Medal in 1958. |
Ernst Walter Mayr (July 5, 1904, Kempten, Germany – February 3, 2005, Bedford, Massachusetts U.S.), was one of the 20th century's leading evolutionary biologists. He was also a renowned taxonomist, tropical explorer, ornithologist, historian of science, and naturalist. His work contributed to the conceptual revolution that led to the modern evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics, systematics, and Darwinian evolution, and to the development of the biological species concept.
Neither Darwin nor anyone else in his time knew the answer to the species problem: how multiple species could evolve from a single common ancestor. Ernst Mayr approached the problem with a new definition for the concept species. In his book Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942) he wrote that a species is not just a group of morphologically similar individuals, but a group that can breed only among themselves, excluding all others. When populations of organisms get isolated, the sub-populations will start to differ by genetic drift and natural selection over a period of time, and thereby evolve into new species. The most significant and rapid genetic reorganization occurs in extremely small populations that have been isolated (as on islands).
His theory of peripatric speciation (a more precise form of allopatric speciation which he advanced) based on his work on birds, is still considered a leading mode of speciation, and was the theoretical underpinning for the theory of punctuated equilibrium, proposed by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould. It was also Mayr who, in a passing comment, suggested that Gould write the book Ontogeny and Phylogeny."[1] Mayr is generally credited with inventing the modern philosophy of biology, particularly of evolutionary biology, which he distinguished from physics due to its introduction of (natural) history into science.
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Mayr was the second son of Helene Pusinelli and Dr. Otto Mayr. His father was a jurist (District Prosecuting Attorney at Würzburg)[2] but took an interest in natural history and took the children out on field trips. He learnt all the local birds in Würzburg from his elder brother Otto. He also had access to a natural history magazine for amateurs, Kosmos. His father died just before he was thirteen. The family then moved to Dresden and he studied at the Staatsgymnasium (“Royal Gymnasium” until 1918) in Dresden-Neustadt and completed his high school education there. In April 1922, while still in high school, he joined the newly founded Saxony Ornithologists’ Association. Here he met Rudolf Zimmermann who was his ornithological mentor during this time. He passed his high school examination (Abitur), in February 1923, and Mayr's mother rewarded him with a pair of binoculars.[3] On 23 March 1923 on the lakes of Moritzburg, the Frauenteich, he spotted what he identified as a Red-crested Pochard. The species had not been seen in Saxony since 1845 and the local club argued about the identity. Raimund Schelcher (1891–1979) of the club then suggested that Mayr visit his classmate Erwin Stresemann on his way to Greifswald where Mayr was to begin his medical studies.[3] After a tough interrogation, Stresemann accepted and published the sighting as authentic. Stresemann was very impressed and suggested that Mayr could work as a volunteer between semesters in the ornithological section of the museum. Mayr wrote about this event It was as if someone had given me the key to heaven.[3] He entered the University of Greifswald in 1923 and, according to Mayr himself, "took the medical curriculum (to satisfy a family tradition)."[4] Mayr was endlessly interested in ornithology and "chose Greifswald at the Baltic for my studies for no other reason than that...it was situated in the ornithologically most interesting area."[4] Although he ostensibly planned to become a physician, he was "first and foremost an ornithologist."[4] During the first semester break Stresemann gave him a test to identify treecreepers and Mayr was able to identify most of the specimens correctly. Stresemann declared that Mayr 'was a born systematist'.[5] In 1925 Stresemann suggested that he give up his medical studies and join the Berlin Museum with the prospect of bird-collecting trips to the tropics on the condition that he completed his doctoral studies in 16 months. Mayr completed his doctorate in ornithology at the University of Berlin under Dr. Carl Zimmer, who was a full professor (Ordentlicher Professor), on 24 June 1926 at the age of 21. On 1 July he accepted the position offered to him at the Museum for a monthly salary of 330.54 Reichsmark.[6]
At the International Zoological Congress at Budapest in 1927, Mayr was introduced by Stresemann to banker and naturalist Walter Rothschild, who asked him to undertake an expedition to New Guinea on behalf of himself and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In New Guinea, Mayr collected several thousands bird skins (he named 26 new bird species during his lifetime) and, in the process also named 38 new orchid species. During his stay in New Guinea, he was invited to accompany the Whitney South Seas Expedition to the Solomon Islands. Also, while in New Guinea, he visited the Lutheran missionaries Otto Thiele and Christian Keyser, in the Finschhafen district; there, while in conversation with his hosts, he uncovered the discrepancies in Hermann Detzner's popular book, Four Years among the Cannibals in German Guinea from 1914 to the Truce, in which Detzner claimed to have seen the interior, discovered several species of flora and fauna, while remaining only steps ahead of the Australian patrols sent to capture him.
He returned to Germany in 1930 and in 1931 he accepted a curatorial position at the American Museum of Natural History, where he played the important role of brokering and acquiring the Walter Rothschild collection of bird skins, which was being sold in order to pay off a blackmailer. During his time at the museum he produced numerous publications on bird taxonomy, and in 1942 his first book, Systematics and the Origin of Species, which completed the evolutionary synthesis started by Darwin.
After Mayr was appointed at the American Museum of Natural History, he influenced American ornithological research by cultivating mentoring relationships with young birdwatchers. Mayr organized a monthly seminar under the auspices of the Linnean Society of New York. This society, under the influence of J. A. Allen, Frank Chapman and Jonathan Dwight concentrated on taxonomy and later became a clearing house for bird banding and sight records. There were a group of eight young birdwatchers from the Bronx and later became the Bronx County Bird Club and they were led by Ludlow Griscom. Mayr was surprised at the differences between American and German Birding Societies. He noted that the German society was "far more scientific, far more interested in life histories and breeding bird species, as well as in reports on recent literature." Mayr also encouraged his Linnaean Society seminar participants to take up a specific research project of their own. "Everyone should have a problem" was the way one Bronx County Bird Club member recalled Mayr's refrain. One of Mayr's seminar participants was Joseph Hickey and under Mayr's influence went on to write A Guide to Birdwatching (1943). Hickey remembered later –"Mayr was our age and invited on all our field trips. The heckling of this German foreigner was tremendous, but he gave tit for tat, and any modern picture of Dr E. Mayr as a very formal person does not square with my memory of the 1930s. He held his own." Mayr's said of his own involvement with the local birdwatchers: "In those early years in New York when I was a stranger in a big city, it was the companionship and later friendship which I was offered in the Linnean Society that was the most important thing in my life."[7]
Mayr also greatly influenced Margaret Morse Nice. Mayr encouraged her to correspond with the European ornithologists of the time, and helped her in her landmark study on Song Sparrows. Nice wrote to Joseph Grinnell in 1932 trying to get foreign literature reviewed in the Condor: "Too many American ornithologists have despised the study of the living bird; the magazines and books that deal with the subject abound in careless statements, anthropomorphic interpretations, repetition of ancient errors, and sweeping conclusions from a pitiful array of facts. ... in Europe the study of the living bird is taken seriously. We could learn a great deal from their writing." Mayr ensured that Nice could publish her two volume Studies in the Life History of the Song Sparrow, finding her a publisher, and her book was reviewed by Aldo Leopold, Grinnell, Jean Delacour. Nice dedicated her book to "My Friend Ernst Mayr."[7]
Mayr joined the faculty of Harvard University in 1953, where he also served as director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology from 1961 to 1970. He retired in 1975 as emeritus professor of zoology, showered with honors. Following his retirement, he went on to publish more than 200 articles, in a variety of journals—more than some reputable scientists publish in their entire careers; 14 of his 25 books were published after he was 65. Even as a centenarian, he continued to write books. On his 100th birthday, he was interviewed by Scientific American magazine.
He received awards including the National Medal of Science, the Balzan Prize, the Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society, the International Prize for Biology, the Loye and Alden Miller Research Award, and the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science. In 1939 he was elected a Corresponding Member of the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union. He was awarded the Linnean Society of London's prestigious Darwin-Wallace Medal in 1958. He was never awarded a Nobel Prize, but he noted that there is no Prize for evolutionary biology, and that Darwin would not have received one, either. Mayr did win a 1999 Crafoord Prize. That prize honors basic research in fields that do not qualify for Nobel Prizes and is administered by the same organization as the Nobel Prize.
Mayr was co-author of six global reviews of bird species new to science (listed below).
He was also an atheist, stating "there is nothing that supports the idea of a personal God".[8]
As a traditionally trained biologist with little mathematical experience, Mayr was often highly critical of early mathematical approaches to evolution such as those of J.B.S. Haldane, famously calling in 1959 such approaches "beanbag genetics". He maintained that factors such as reproductive isolation had to be taken into account. In a similar fashion, Mayr was also quite critical of molecular evolutionary studies such as those of Carl Woese.
In many of his writings, Mayr rejected reductionism in evolutionary biology, arguing that evolutionary pressures act on the whole organism, not on single genes, and that genes can have different effects depending on the other genes present. He advocated a study of the whole genome rather than of isolated genes only. Current molecular studies in evolution and speciation indicate that although allopatric speciation seems to be the norm in groups (such as in many invertebrates—especially in the insects), there are numerous cases of sympatric speciation in groups with greater mobility (such as the birds).
After articulating the biological species concept in 1942, Mayr played a central role in the species problem debate over what was the best species concept. He staunchly defended the biological species concept against the many definitions of "species" that others proposed.
Mayr was an outspoken defender of the scientific method, and one known to sharply critique science on the edge. As a notable recent example, he criticized the search for aliens as conducted by fellow Harvard professor Paul Horowitz as being a waste of university and student resources, for its inability to address and answer a scientific question.
Mayr rejected the idea of a gene-centered view of evolution and starkly but politely criticized Richard Dawkins' ideas:
The funny thing is if in England, you ask a man in the street who the greatest living Darwinian is, he will say Richard Dawkins. And indeed, Dawkins has done a marvelous job of popularizing Darwinism. But Dawkins' basic theory of the gene being the object of evolution is totally non-Darwinian. I would not call him the greatest Darwinian.[9]
Mayr insisted throughout his career that the gene as the target of selection cannot and should not be considered a valid idea in modern evolutionary thought.
“The idea that a few people have about the gene being the target of selection is completely impractical; a gene is never visible to natural selection, and in the genotype, it is always in the context with other genes, and the interaction with those other genes make a particular gene either more favorable or less favorable. In fact, Dobzhanksy, for instance, worked quite a bit on so-called lethal chromosomes which are highly successful in one combination, and lethal in another. Therefore people like Dawkins in England who still think the gene is the target of selection are evidently wrong. In the 30's and 40's, it was widely accepted that genes were the target of selection, because that was the only way they could be made accessible to mathematics, but now we know that it is really the whole genotype of the individual, not the gene. Except for that slight revision, the basic Darwinian theory hasn't changed in the last 50 years.”[9]
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