News & Views item - February  2005

 

 

Ernst Mayr, Dead at 100. (February 5, 2005)

    The Harvard Gazette yesterday announced that the foremost living exponent of Darwinism died on February 3rd  at a retirement community in Bedford, Mass. after a brief illness. He was widely considered the world's most eminent evolutionary biologist.

 

Born July 5, 1904, in Kempten, Germany, Mayr earned a medical degree from the University of Greifswald in 1925 but turned his attention to zoology, earning a Ph.D. from the University of Berlin after 16 months. In 1927, at the International Zoological Congress in Budapest, he met Lord Rothschild, who was looking for someone to travel to New Guinea to collect birds of paradise.

 

Mayr spent the next two and a half years in the South Seas, studying isolated populations of birds and analysing the genetic differences that had accumulated among them and "Mayr showed what Darwin had never quite succeeded in establishing: that new species arise from isolated populations. He published his findings in the 1942 book Systematics and the Origin of Species. He authored or co-authored more than 20 books, including the seminal texts Animal Species and Evolution (1963) and The Growth of Biological Thought (1982), and contributed to well over 600 papers published in peer-reviewed journals."

 

Mayr began his US academic career at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City in the 1930s then joined the Harvard faculty in 1953 as the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and led Harvard's Comparative Zoology museum from 1961 to 1970. He retired from the university in 1975 but was academically active until he died. His most recent interest, interrupted by his death, was a comprehensive reanalysis of Darwin' ideas.

 

Mayr's wife Margarete died in 1990; they'd been married 55 years. He is survived by two daughters, Christa, and Susy, five grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren. 

 

The elder daughter, Christa, in fact featured in James Watson's account of his pursuit of women. The co-discover of the DNA double helix focused a great deal of his attentions on Christa Mayr, whom The Guardian coyly referred to as the "daughter of a colleague". He pursued Christa for several years before she told him she did not and could not love him. He was just 'too tense'.

 

The New York Times' obituary is available online.