Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:. Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. Advanced search. Skip to main content Thank you for visiting nature. Download PDF. German-born biologist formulated the modern concept of species. You have full access to this article via your institution.
One of the greats: Ernst Mayr helped to reconcile evolution and genetics. Authors Michael Hopkin View author publications. Rights and permissions Reprints and Permissions. About this article Cite this article Hopkin, M. Copy to clipboard. It's this isolation or separation that creates new species, said Mayr.
The traits that evolve during the period of isolation are called " isolating mechanisms ," and they discourage the two populations from interbreeding. Moreover, Mayr declared that the development of many new species is what leads to evolutionary progress.
The species, then, is the keystone of evolution. Ernst Mayr and the Evolutionary Synthesis. Topics Covered: Evolution Since Darwin.
Ernst Mayr and the Evolutionary Synthesis:. Ironically, one great unsolved problem in Darwin's master work, On the Origin of Species , was just that: How and why do species originate? 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 , 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 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 , 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 of the Balzan prize, considered to be the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for the biological sciences. In , at the age of 90, Mayr was awarded the prestigious Japan Prize by the Committee on the International prize for biology. In an 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 , Stephen Jay Gould observed that he really only changed careers—from a scientist he became a historian of science. In , 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 , 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.
Mayr anthologized his most influential articles, with an autobiographical and explanatory section, in his Evolution and the Diversity of Life II
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