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Ernst Mayr
Sign in to saveAlso known as Ernst Walter Mayr, E. Mayr, E. W. Mayr
German-American evolutionary biologist (1904-2005)
Ernst Mayr was a German-American evolutionary biologist who lived from 1904 to 2005 and made major contributions to understanding how species evolve and develop. His work was influential in shaping modern biology and our understanding of evolution, making him one of the most important biologists of the 20th century.
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Person · Open Library
- Born
- 5 July 1904
- Died
- 3 February 2005
- Works
- 113
Top works
- Systema avium Australasianarum
- Populações, espécies, e evolução
- La specie
- Sistematika i pronskhozhdenie vidov
- Animal species and evolution
via Open Library + Wikidata
Recent publications · Crossref
5 total works indexed
- Reproducible, interactive, scalable and extensible microbiome data science using QIIME 2
· 2019 · cited 19,959x
- Controlled growth of monodisperse silica spheres in the micron size range
· 1968 · cited 13,338x
- Recommendations for Cardiac Chamber Quantification by Echocardiography in Adults: An Update from the American Society of Echocardiography and the European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging
· 2015 · cited 11,557x
- Staging of brain pathology related to sporadic Parkinson’s disease
· 2003 · cited 9,073x
- The Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Technical Summary
· 2000 · cited 8,823x
via Crossref · CC0
Quotes
- “Biological classifications have two major objectives: to serve as a basis of biological generalizations in all sort of comparative studies and to serve as a key to an information storage system... Is the classification that is soundest as a basis of generalizations also most convenient for information retrieval? This, indeed, seems to have been true in most cases I have encountered.”
- “Evolution, thus, is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection. No longer is a fixed object transformed, as in transformational evolution, but an entirely new start is, so to speak, made in every generation.”
- “According to the concept of transformational evolution, first clearly articulated by Lamarck, evolution consists of the gradual transformation of organisms from one condition of existence to another”
- “Having reached the rare age of 100 years, I find myself in a unique position: I'm the last survivor of the golden age of the Evolutionary Synthesis. That status encourages me to present a personal account of what I experienced in the years (1920s to the 1950s) that were so crucial in the history of evolutionary biology.”
- “Life is simply the reification of the process of living.”
- “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”
via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA
Wikidata facts
- Image
- Ernst Mayr PLoS.jpg
Show 8 more facts
- date of birth
- 1904-07-05
- date of death
- 2005-02-03
- Commons category
- Ernst Mayr
- name in native language
- Ernst Mayr
- P6944
- Ernst Mayr
- author citation (zoology)
- Mayr
- curriculum vitae URL
- www.discoverlife.org/who/CV/Mayr,_Ernst.html
- P8168
- Aston Martin Vantage
via Wikidata · CC0
~36 min read
Article
Ernst Walter Mayr (/maɪər/ MYRE; German: [ɛʁnst ˈmaɪɐ]; 5 July 1904 – 3 February 2005) was a German-American evolutionary biologist. He was also a renowned taxonomist, tropical explorer, ornithologist, philosopher of biology, and historian of science. 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.
Although Charles Darwin and others posited that multiple species could evolve from a single common ancestor, the mechanism by which this occurred was not understood, creating the species problem. Ernst Mayr approached the problem with a new definition for 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 within a species become isolated by geography, feeding strategy, mate choice, or other means, they may start to differ from other populations through genetic drift and natural selection, and over time may evolve into new species. The most significant and rapid genetic reorganization occurs in extremely small populations that have been isolated (as on islands).