'Darwin of the 20th century' dies
Associated PressPublished February 5, 2005
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Ernst Mayr, a leading evolutionary biologist, has died at 100.
The longtime Harvard University faculty member died Thursday (Feb. 3, 2005) at a retirement community in Bedford.
He was known as an architect of the evolutionary or modern synthesis, an intellectual watershed when modern evolutionary biology was born. The synthesis, which has been described by Dr. Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard as "one of the half-dozen major scientific achievements in our century," reconciled Darwin's theories of evolution with new findings in laboratory genetics and in fieldwork on animal populations and diversity.
One of Dr. Mayr's most significant contributions was his argument for the role of geography in the origin of new species, an idea that has won virtually universal acceptance among evolutionary theorists. He also established a philosophy of biology and founded the field of the history of biology.
"Much as we know about the "how' of human evolution, the "why' is still a great puzzle," he wrote in 1963.
In a career spanning nine decades, Dr. Mayr, emeritus professor of zoology at Harvard, exerted a broad and powerful influence over the field of evolutionary biology. His most recent book, What Makes Biology Unique? Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline (Cambridge University Press), was published in August, one month after his 100th birthday.
"He was the Darwin of the 20th century, the defender of the faith," said Dr. Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, a historian of science at the University of Florida.
His work in the 1930s and '40s, while a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, established him as a leading "neo-Darwinist."
In his travels in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, Dr. Mayr showed, unlike Darwin, that species can arise from isolated populations.
Over his remarkably productive career, Dr. Mayr wrote or edited 20 books and wrote more than 600 journal articles. After his official retirement in 1975, he published more than 200 of the articles, more than many scientists do in their entire careers. He received awards including the National Medal of Science, the Balzan Prize and the International Prize. He once noted that Nobel Prizes were not given in evolutionary biology, saying, "Darwin wouldn't have won it either."
Born in Kempten, Germany, Dr. Mayr joined the Harvard faculty in 1953 as a zoology professor and led Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology from 1961 to 1970. He retired in 1975.
He is survived by two daughters, five grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.
Information from the New York Times was used in this report.