On the Importance of Being Ernst Mayr

not only the greatest evolutionary biologist of the 20th century, but even its greatest biologist overall. Thomas Henry Huxley was dubbed " Darwin's bulldog " for fi ghting for the acceptance of Darwinian ideas soon after their inception in the last decades of the 19th century. Similarly, Ernst Mayr has been called " Darwin's apostle " or the " Darwin of the 20th century " for promoting and dispersing Darwin's hypotheses throughout the past century. Mayr lived for a century and accomplished more than several lifetime's worth of science in different biological disciplines. Brought up by parents who loved nature and who took the young Ernst on long hikes, he was exposed to natural history early on, but although birds were his passion all his life, he was, like Darwin, fi rst compelled to study medicine. He began his studies at Greifswald—a prime birding spot—and through the chance observation of a rare species of duck that had not been seen in Germany for many years, he came in contact with the Berlin ornithologist Erwin Stresemann, who proposed that he switch to biology. Mayr abandoned medicine for biology and published his fi rst scientifi c paper (of a total of almost 700) at the age of 19 in 1923, receiving his Ph.D. from Humboldt University in Berlin after only 16 months of graduate work and dissertation research; he was just 22. Ernst Mayr's last book (of a total of 25) was published in August 2004, a month after he turned 100 [1]. In 1931, thinking that he would not be offered a permanent post in Germany, he moved from Berlin to the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. In New York he called himself an ornithologist, and believed then, like many of his contemporaries, in Lamarkian inheritance. Sent by his advisor Erwin Stresemann from Berlin and fi nanced by Lord Rothschild, he had just returned from over two years of perilous fi eldwork in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. The parallels to the lives of Darwin and Wallace may not be coincidental. During these expeditions, forlorn, at times given up for dead, exposed to tropical diseases and the danger of headhunters, he collected the skins of thousands of specimens, eating the fl esh of many. Mayr was not only the ornithologist who probably tasted the largest number of different species of birds, but he also named 26 new species …